Eagle Consus External HDD Enclosures

The Eagle I-Series

What you get

The I-Series Consus External Enclosure supports up to two SATA 3.0Gb/s drives.  These drives (with the included software) can be used as one giant drive and can be up to 2 TB, up to 1 TB each.  Another cool feature is the 1-button backup.  The packaging was just about the same, and all the same items were included with the I-Series minus the screw driver.  Which was actually a little surprising since there are more screws involved with the I-Series.  But that's definitely not something you can hold against Eagle, if you have a computer, you should have a screw driver.

  

As we get a close-up of the I-Series Enclosure, the first thing that I noticed was the orange front bezel.  This was actually a little bit of a turn-off for me at first, but included was a silver one as well.  The orange popped right off and the silver took it's place immediately after I realized that was an option.  Granted, that's just a matter of opinion. 

  

The I-Series also includes a 40mm fan to help keep some airflow over the two drives enclosed in the Consus.  You'll also note the same USB plug, power switch, and a very unique power plug.  The under side of the case holds the four screws that are removed to get to installing the drives.

  

Upon removing the four screws, the hard drive bracket slides out of the rear of the enclosure.  The HDD lines up with the screws here just as it would if you were mounting it inside a case.  These hold the HDD securely in place and the bracket slips right back into the enclosure.  Piece of cake.

  

Here, take a look at what the Eagle Consus I-Series Enclosure looks like once plugged in and powered up.  I actually like the look of this one a bit more.  The blue LED on the front shows power, and an integrated red LED flashes to show HDD activity, giving it sort of a lavender glow while active.  Very sleek.

Benchmarking

To test out the enclosures, we used SiSoft Sandra's File System Benchmarking tool.  I also went the old fashioned route of copying a large, 1.1GB file from my Internal SATA 3.0Gb/s drive onto the additional drive and timing it.  The new drive was tested initially installed inside of my case and plugged directly into a SATA 3.0Gb/s port on the motherboard.  The same drive was then installed in each of the enclosures and tested from there.

Test Bed

• ASUS P5N32-E SLI PLUS Motherboard

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 @ 2.66 GHz

• (2) 1GB Mushkin PC2-4300 Dual Channel DDR2 Memory

• Fixed Drive: Western Digital Caviar 250GB SATA300, 7200RPM, 16MB Cache HDD

• Test Drive: Western Digital Caviar 500GB SATA300, 7200RPM, 16MB Cache HDD

• Windows XP Professional with SP2 installed

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