Kingwin 3.5" & 5.25" Portable USB Enclosures

Manufacturer: Kingwin
Supplied by: Kingwin
Street Price: TBA

By Dean Barker (7/10/2004)

Introduction

Portable storage devices have really been put in the limelight because of the popularity and wide availability by thumb drives.  Thumb drives are great personal storage units but what do you do when you have more than a couple hundred megs to transport?  Say your MP3 collection, videos or otherwise big files.  This is where USB drive racks come in.  They give you the ability to make a hard drive hot swappable and give you ready access to as much storage as the drive in question has.  Kingwin in putting out their new USB drive enclosure, made the next logical progression in external drives by putting out a 5.25" USB drive enclosure.  The ability of making a optical drive portable is welcome indeed.  You can take your CD burner, DVD player or DVD burner with you and plug them into any machine with a USB port.  You will still need software to play or record DVDs but that is a small issue.

Today, we have Kingwin's new 3.5" and 5.25" drive enclosures on the bench.  Aside from the uses we noted above, Kingwin has added a bit of panache in the way of blue and orange lighting.  Let's take a closer look at these two units.

Both units are sold individually but each come with an installation manual, Driver disk (for Win98 and Mac users), a pair of drive enclosure stands, approximately six feet of USB extension line to reach your computer as well as power cables.  The power cables needs to be plugged directly into the wall.  The 3.5" device's power line is a bit over four feet while the 5.25" device's line is in two segments totaling about eleven feet.  Below are the 3.5" enclosure and 5.25" drive enclosure kits respectively.

  

Stacking the devices one on top of another we get an idea of scale.  The smaller of the two units measures 227 x 150 x 32mm while the optical drive enclosure is considerable larger at 254 x 185 x 50mm.  Let's take a look at each now in detail.

Aluminum USB Hard Drive Enclosure

Specifications

• Application: 3.5" external drive enclosure

• Observed Dimensions: 227 (L) x 150 (W) x 32mm (H)

• Weight: 1.4kg

• Construction: Aluminum/Plastic

• Bus Interface: USB 2.0

• Interface: IDE

• Lighting: Blue power light bar with orange drive activity light bar

• Available Colors: Silver

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