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hardware tech site for the rest of us.
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SanMax USB 2.0 External Drive Enclosure Opening the unit proved mildly challenging. The manual shows that it is opened by pushing in the top half of the circular depression that is the latch you see below with a pen top. Now I ignored this thinking I would open it with my fingers but I finally resigned myself to it wasn't going to work that way after about five minutes. Surprisingly, even with a pen top as the manual suggests, the device remains rather difficult to open. Much more so than it should be.
The pictures below give you a good idea of how slim the device is. The drive inside is a Maxtor 40gb ATA133. Connecting the HDD is like any other at this point; connect up your power and ribbon cable and you set.
The vertical stand really adds some functionally to the unit in that you can tuck it away neatly next to your monitor, PC or whatever you want.
Performance Performance for an external rack is just as much a matter of function and utility as well as speed. USB 2.0 transfers data at 480 megabits/second. This is roughly just below the speed of an older hard drive with USB 2.0 rated at 60 megabytes/second. Our testing mythology is easy to follow. We are going to run SiSoft Sandra 2003's File System Benchmark on our test drive with it hooked up as a slave via standard IDE ribbon cables and then the same drive again in the USB External Rack. We already know that the IDE connection is going to blow the USB transfer rates away but we need to get a handle on how much. Before we go on you know I have to do the cursory statement. No two systems will perform identically, or for that matter, there will be variations within a single system to some degree depending on several factors. Hence, our results may end up being a little better or a little worse than the results you may get in your own box. Test Bed
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