Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
My latest adventure (you will read about it soon) left me with a few SATA hard drives lying around. With those drives came a great opportunity to incorporate them into an off site storage solution. That being said, I absolutely must do this with some style. Enter the Eagle Tech Consus N-Series Sata to USB enclosure.
Eagle Tech has a very industrial feel to their products. The presentation starts with their website and transcends into their products. Hard and soft edges along with some color contrasts bring attention to them aesthetically yet somehow still maintain a simple appearance. Do they offer features to match? The ET-CSNSU2-BK Consus series enclosure is garnished with aluminum side panels, thumb screws, a USB 2.0 (would you expect anything less?) interface, provided USB cable, a power adapter, and an internal SATA interface that supports both SATA 150 and SATA 300.
The simple yet elegant design of the ET-CSNSU2-BK is not the only thing that makes this unit attractive. From a practical perspective, the thumb screw design makes opening the unit very easy. The hard drive still should be fixed using regular screws and the provided screw driver makes that a bit easier. If you are slick, when you put the unit together you can even make a bit of room to store the screw driver in the enclosure!
The thumb screws are a nice touch; on the flip side, those of us with fat fingers would surely appreciate a little more depth to the screws. The factory ships these things tight and it was necessary to pull out my trusty pliers to get them lose. Just remember to make them snug and not go crazy when putting your panels back after assembly.
I can appreciate that Eagle did not try to get us to use some useless backup software as some other manufacturers do; simple file copy or some commercial software is mostly the best option anyway.
The interior is simple and to the point and making the connection for your hard drive couldn’t be easier. There is just enough room to set the hard drive and make the connection. The drive slides into the unit smoothly and without much force. Eagle, thankfully, also chose not to go crazy with the LED’s; simplicity is appreciated. There is an LED for power and one for disk activity.
A lot of review sites will bombard you with benchmarks on these external enclosures and they are not completely useless, but you have to remember that you are limited to the speed and throughput of USB. After having conducted various reviews on these types of external enclosures you will see a pattern emerging. THE BENCHMARKS ARE BASICALLY THE SAME across units.
