Software

The only software supplied with this enclosure is a driver for all of the most popular operating systems. I found that in Windows XP you don't even have to install the driver supplied with the enclosure for it to work. It seems that the driver on the CD is already integrated in Windows XP. This is of course a major bonus, being able to use the enclosure on any Windows XP PC without having to install a driver.

Performance

The performance of this enclosure was tested by running a series of disk benchmarks with a Seagate 120 GB 7200.7 IDE hard drive installed in it. The enclosure was hooked up to my PC via the USB 2.0 cable bundled with the enclosure. While running the disk benchmarks nothing else besides core Windows components were running on the PC.


Managing to hit an average read speed of 34.4 MB/s is really good for a USB 2.0 based enclosure. Compared to other USB 2.0 hard drive enclosures recently reviewed, this is the new king of the hill. Even though 34.4 MB/s is fast it's still nowhere near the performance one can achieve by hooking up the drive to an internal IDE disk controller.


What surprised me a bit is that this enclosure uses fewer resources than any of the other USB 2.0 enclosures tested by this site, and still manages to beat them in terms of raw read speed performance.


The enclosure also performs very well in the ATTO benchmark program. What is important to remember is that ATTO simulates small block transfers from and to the disk and therefore disk performance in this benchmark has a tendency to be bottlenecked by the controller and not the hard drive.

Performance of this enclosure was really good in both read and write speeds. The only thing that worried me a bit during these tests was the temperature of the enclosure.