Kingwin Mini Shuttle External Enclosure

The only control lamps are on the top.  The larger of the two on the left is elevated a bit and has 'Kingwin' stamped into it.  Under power, a green LED lights under this making a nice effect.  The indicator on the right is for power on and fan failure.  Should the 40mm cooling fan fail, the red indicator illuminates alerting the user that things are not right.

The unit is constructed entirely from aluminum and its feel is lightweight while still feeling reasonably sturdy.  I'm not sure the Mini Shuttle would rate as a heavy duty rack but its pricing balances this out a bit.  Notice below the irregularly shaped thumb screws holding the top plate down as well as the smaller rubber feet on the corners of the base.

  

The recessed portion of the thumb screws and the rubber feet mate up to make the Mini Shuttle stackable. 

  

Inside

Opening up the Kingwin unit was very easy.  Three of the sides below are removable.  This is seen as part of the construction process and not for any specific purpose.  The sides and top sections will act as heatsinks to some degree keeping an installed drive's temperature down which is assisted that much more by the floor mounted 40mm cooling fan set up as an exhaust.

  

Installation and operation went smooth and without incident.  Our Maxtor IDE drive fit in snugly without any objection.  Adequate clearance was available for the power and ribbon cable connections.  The drive is secured in place by two small holes on the underside of the Kingwin Mini Shuttle that allow the user to install screws through these holes, into the lower mounted mounting holes of the drive.

     

Performance

Testing was done with SiSoft Sandra 2005 Pro's File System Benchmark to confirm that we didn't lose anything of consequence in the transfer.  The test drive we found to test things out ended up being a Maxtor DiamondMax 9 ATA133 80gb hard drive disk.  Running this test repeatedly gave no variance in the performance results.  To be quite honest, I was very impressed.  Performance remained strong even though channeled through the USB connection.

 

Conclusion

Kingwin has pulled together features and simple clean looks to make a very nice product.  Most drive enclosures have a bulky feel and don't have a look that seems at home on top of a high end case.  This is not the case with the Kingwin Mini Shuttle.  As you have seen, the Mini Shuttle is not an ordinary USB enclosure and I fully expect it to be well received en mass as it hits the retail shelves.  A product we can heartily recommend. 

Pros

• Very clean lines

• Good performance

• Multiple drives can be stacked

• Lightweight

• Inexpensive

Cons

• Not heavy duty

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