The Right side of the unit has Thermaltake's name and logo stamped into the metal.  Big and bold but not too overpowering.

Around back, we find a simple and clean layout.  Two port are present, one for the DC power in and the other is the USB 2.0 port.  Also notice the row of vent holes along on side.  This functions as an exhaust for warm air coming off the drive inside.

Along the spine of the Silver River you can see two light blue rubber pads.  These hold the cover on to the rest of the enclosure with a small nipple that locks the cover in place.  We'll see a close up of these in a minute.

A quick shot of the vertical rack.  Rubber strips line the contact area so you won't be scratching up your enclosure everytime you use it in its standing position.

Removal of the top tray was clean and easy.  Inside the enclosure we find an 80mm cooling fan.  What is interesting is how this draws and expels air.  The left vent we saw on the SilverRiver's bezel and the rear venting we already noted are exhaust while the right vent on the front bezel is the air intake.  The fan spins at 1500 RPM and during operation was barely audible.

Performance

To test the Thermaltake SilverRiver we selected SiSoft Sandra 2004 Pro File System Benchmark.  It measures the transfer rate on a specified drive, then compares its transfer speeds with those of other popular systems.  As you can see below, the Thermaltake SilverRiver holds up nicely and provides excellent transfer speed.  For this we hooked the Tt Silver River up to our P4 rig and let things rip.

Test Bed

• Intel 2.4GHz Pentium 4 ‘C’ chip @ 3.3GHz / 1.875 volts

• Thermaltake BigWater H2O Cooler

• ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe mainboard

• Corsair TwinX 1024 XMS4400 DDR

• Inno3D GeForce 6800

• Seagate 120gb SATA HDD

• Lian Li PC-V1100 Case

• Windows XP Pro with all patches and Service Pack 1 installed

• Drive used in SilverRiver - Maxtor 80gb ATA133 7200RPM HDD

Results

Below is a screen shot of the Sandra 2004 Pro's benchmarking results.

Conclusion

External drive enclosures have become stylish items sporting clean lines and sharp designs just as high end cases do.  Thermaltake has done an excellent job with the SilverRiver's overall design.  Personally, I think it is one of, if not the best looking external drive enclosure I've ever seen.  This beauty isn't skin deep as we saw in our results.  The SilverRiver functions well in providing high speed data access and making itself and our data highly portable.  We did not do any direct temperature measurements to see how well the ventilation system worked.  I can tell you that after several hours of drive activity, I did pop the Silver River open to find that our drive mounted inside was only warm to the touch. 

The function of an external hard drive enclosure is to give you portable data storage that is hot swappable and do this with as compact a device as possible.  The Thermaltake SilverRiver does all this while bringing a lot of style to the table.  The fan and cooling design worked well and I have no reservations in highly recommending this product to those of you with a need for this type of device.

Pros

• Aesthetically pleasing

• Highly functional

• Compatible with Windows or MAC OS

• Compact

• Portable

• Effective and innovative cooling system

Cons

• Price and availability unknown at present.

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