Kingwin KF-72 SATA Mobile Hard Drive Rack

The weight of the KF-72 is a nice change from the heavier racks we have seen in the past.  Also nice is the side mounted catch that holds the top cover in place.  Most people using a choose not to screw their drive in place.  With the previous Kingwin rack, the top cover catch was on the lid itself.  Meaning if you didn't secure your drive, it could move forward in the housing potentially jamming the top latch and keep you from getting back into the housing without a fight.  This is most certainly not the case with the KF-72.  Very nice.

Opening the housing up we see a SATA power and data cable.  What is less apparent are the four grommets at the screw mount points where you secure the drive to the housing.  These grommets are billed and function as tiny shock absorbers, dampening out any vibration.  They also keep your drive mounted snugly if you choose not to screw your drive in place as is recommended by the manufacturer.

  

Performance

Testing the performance of any rack is pretty straight forward.  We want to be sure that no degradation of our data signal occurs through use of the rack.  To do this we used SiSoft Sandra 2003 Pro's File System Benchmark to measure the transfer rate of the drive with and without the rack in place.  Our results are the average of five runs per setup with the highest and lowest results being thrown out.

Test Bed

• ABIT KD7-G (KT400) mainboard
• AMD XP 2400 T-Bred
• 256mb DIMM Corsair XMS3500 (x2)
• Inno3D Tornado GeForce FX 5600 Ultra
• Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA HDD

Results

Conclusion

The Kingwin KF-72 has all the utility you would expect in a hard drive rack.  Adding this to the new high speed SATA drives on the market make the KF-72 a nice accessory to increase your productivity with use of any large files.  A couple of the most appreciated changes are the shift to ABS plastic subsequently making the unit very light and the enclosure cover lid being held in place by a side mounted latch.  The only two items that made our head cock to one side was the lack of a hard drive activity lamp and the drive enclosure smoothness we referenced earlier.  All in all, the Kingwin KF-72 is a versatile and worthwhile product for anyone wanting or needing large chunks of data to be portable.

Pros

• Very lightweight

• Drive tray cover latch is side mounted making removal easy and problem free.

• Aesthetically pleasing

• Outstanding utility for those needed to transfer large amounts of data.

Cons

• No HDD activity lamp

• Drive handle not smooth in its operation.

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