Over the past 15 years, I've used quite a few external hard drives. Whether being full 5.25 drive enclosures(more along the lines of a separate case) holding the old full size SCSI drives, down to the tiny portable 1.5" flash drives. From my point of view, when it comes to performance nothing beats having the drive installed directly in your computer.  With that being said, from early days of Parallel port drives to external SCSI, to USB 1.0, to Firewire, to USB 2.0 and now much more recently eSATA, we've come a long way as far as external performance is concerned.

I've had my fair share of external enclosures and purchased quite a few "pre-configured" external hard drives from manufacturers such as Western Digital and Maxtor. Unfortunately, I've always been generally disappointed by either the build quality of the 3rd party enclosures of which almost all of them have been "mediocre" at best, made mostly from what feels like "cheap" plastic. While the pre-configured Maxtor's and Western Digital's "seem" to be built a bit more "rugged", they still don't live up to the performance that the newer drives should be.

Along comes Kingwin with their Elite Series external hard drive enclosures offering up both USB 2.0 and the relatively new eSATA in an enclosure that not only feels strong and has a tiny bit of extra weight to it, but also has the "pretty" factor to it as well. Kingwin is offering up a range of colors for those of you trying to match with your case.

Today we set out to test Kingwin's new Elite Series enclosures that just may change the way I look at external hard drive enclosures. Kingwin sent us a pair of Elite Series enclosures to test out; one in Red and one in Blue (black is also available).

Features 

• Product Link 

• 3.5" E-SATA + USB + One touch back up combo aluminum H.D.D. Enclosure.

• Futuristic capsule design w/ front blue led.

• SATA Interface.

• Applicable for PC, notebook, and Mac.

• Plug & Play, hot-swapping capability.

• Up to 3.0 Gbps Data Transfer Speed in ESATA.

• Up to 480 Mbps Data Transfer Speed in USB .

• Suitable for all 3.5" SATA H.D.D.

• 1 stand

• Strengthen aluminum finish.

Specs 

• Interface:  E-SATA + USB 2.0 Combo

• Data speed:  USB 2.0: 1.5/12/480 Mbps./ SATA: 1.5/3 Gb/s.

• Rear panel connection:  USB B receptacle/E-SATA connector

• Dimension:  205 (L) x 130 (W) x 35 (H) mm

• Support OS:  Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP/Vista; Mac OS 10x & Above

• One touch backup:  Yes

• Hard Drive Support:  3.5" SATA Hard Disc

• Weight:  2.5 lbs (1134 g) / unit