Drive access and the enclosure's control is all situated on the rear end of the unit.  Two Philips head screws on opposing sides lock things in place.  Once removed, the rear plate section slides out allowing installation/removal of your SATA hard drive.

The items in between are self explanatory, a on/off rocker switch, USB 2.0 port, eSATA port, your one touch back up button (used in conjunction with included software) and your DC power in port.

Using multiple drives gives you an interesting look if you are not into being overly color coded.

Installation

We mentioned earlier that two screws allow the unit to be pulled apart.  The pictures below say it all.  Installing a drive is as easy as plugging in the power and SATA data line.  The third line you see below is a power line for a front mounted LED which we'll show you shortly.

One touch back up.

The included CD has a software backup program on it called PC Clone Lite.  This really brings out the utility of an external enclosure as a backup device in addition to its making large files portable.  The backup program allows for custom file transfers from your machine to the Kingwin Elite.  It also allows you to select a target and destination path so that by touching the backup button on the rear of the unit, the target you preselected is automatically backed up.  Not exactly a full system hardware backup but as far as me keeping copies of important files, fantastic.

Here is the Kingwin Elite under power.  Remember the small wire we showed you earlier?  Here is the Kingwin logo illuminated in the black end plate.  One of the few times I actually didn't mind seeing a manufacturer's badging.  Not overpowering in the least.

Performance

To check out the Kingwin Elite's performance we are going to use the HD Tach program.  HD Tach will give us average read and burst speed in MB/sec as well as random access speed times.  Pulled out my far from overpowered AMD Turion MT-40 powered Acer laptop to serve as our test bed let's have a go.

Something we have done when reviewing flash drives here at the Penthouse Labs has been to put a clock on the real world speed of a transfer.  Just for fun, we're going to time the same 720MB file (small for external drive applications) we used in testing transfer speed with some flash drives.  In our review of the OCZ Rally2 Turbo Thumb Drive, we found it took 121 seconds tor transfer this file.  With our Kingwin Elite after a Western Digital Caviar 250GB SATA II Drive got installed, we did another speed run.  Sixty-eight seconds!  The bottle neck isn't the USB transfer rate!

Conclusion

Kingwin has released a fine package with their Elite Enclosure.  I say package and not product for a reason.  The enclosure itself has a bit of snappy flash but not too much.  It offers external SATA and USB 2.0 interface capability in case you ever need that 3GB/sec transfer rate.  But it's the extras that make it really shine.  The subtle vertical stand for one makes it easy to tuck the Elite next to a cable modem or router without looking out of place or taking up valuable real estate on your desk.  But the big bonus is the PC Clone Lite program that is included with the drive.  An outstanding and simple backup program coupled with a one touch button on the rear of the Kingwin Elite shows how some products are truly engineered to work hand in hand with needs in mind and certain software in hand.

We didn't have any overt complaints with the device other than an observation.  The Kingwin Elite did not have a cooling fan inside.  Granted, the frame itself is aluminum and will get rid of some excess heat via conduction/convection but no air flow bothers me.  However, no matter how long we kept the drive working inside the Elite, we couldn't get it to run excessively hot.  With this said, I can't in good conscious pop Kingwin for leaving out a cooling fan while the enclosure's design didn't seem to warrant one.

Sticking to a proven design program of releasing well thought out products coupled with software to take full advantage of them makes Kingwin really shine in my book.  The Kingwin Elite Enclosure is a worthwhile package in its own right.  The addition of the software and the one touch back up button only adds icing to the cake.  At $35, this is a worthwhile device for large file backup and transfer.  Here's the product link where these units are available now at NewEgg.