Assembly

To pull the tray out, you will have to remove two screws in the rear. The tray itself comes out easily and two small cables dropped right out of the box. A short power cable and a SATA cable. It would have been much nicer if they went straight for the appropriate connector on the PCB to plug the drive into. The tray construction quality is mediocre, as it is easily bent and the overall assembly does not feel very sturdy.


The dreaded fan is tiny and manages to create quite the racket as we will hear when it turns on. Spire is pretty open about the IC used - the JM20336, which is wide spread and can be found in many different enclosures these days.


Trying to install a Western Digital 320 GB SATA II drive, I stumbled across a very obvious problem. The angled SATA power connector did not have enough space between the drive and the PCB, making it impossible to insert the screw to secure the hard drive to the tray. This would be easily solved by making the screw holes oval, thus giving the user a bit of freedom where to place the drive. The tray itself is long enough to allow such an installation. I am surprised that Spire never noticed this, as the problem is more than obvious.


I managed to screw in two of the screws, tilting the drive slightly as you can clearly see in the image above. The enclosure itself is a tad bit larger than the tray, so no parts of the hard drive come in direct contact with the aluminum chassis of the Spire Pro. We all know that air is a very good insulation material, so good that modern european windows have two panes of glas, with air inbetween for example.


Turning the Slide Pro on is interesting in some way. The fan takes about 10-15 seconds to spin up to full speed. So over that period of time, the device becomes louder and louder. Spire did not place a temperature controlled fan inside of the device. During benchmarking, the unit actually heated up a bit and was warm to the touch. There is simply no reason to place a fan into an enclosure with just a tiny opening. No matter if one chooses to use a fan or not, there has to be sufficient exhausts to allow for hot air to escape. In the case of the Spire Pro, all that hot air fills up inside the enclosure and causes a heat build-up.