The 3.5-Inch USB 2.0/eSATA Hard Drive Enclosure:

     The Stackable External Drive enclosures come in a variety of flavors: IDE to USB 2.0, IDE to USB 2.0 or FireWire and SATA to USB 2.0 or eSATA.  For many of us just moving to eSATA the speed of eSATA coupled with an additional USB 2.0 port offers the best of both worlds: backwards compatibility with most older systems and the highest performance offered in a standard external enclosure all in one device.  If you are on the fence or simply planning for a future upgrade, this is definitely the way to go.

The external drive enclosures offer the same stackable design as the other Stackable devices. 

Each enclosure can be mounted vertically with the included brackets, or flat with the rubber feet.  The feet mount with included double sided sticky pads.  Even if you use up the included extra set, you could fashion replacements with a razor from any double sided foam tape.

Specifications

• Plug and Play USB 2.0 and E-SATA Interface
• Support 3.5" SATA Hard Drives
• Maximum Capacity Supported: 750 GB
• 30mm Cooling Fan
• Front LED Indicators
• Dual External Firewire Ports
• USB 2.0 Transfer Rate: 480Mbps
• E-SATA Transfer Rate: 2400Mbps
• DC Power: 12V

System Requirements

• Windows 98SE / ME / 2000 / XP / Vista
• Mac OS 9 and above
• CDROM Drive for Driver Installation
  (Windows 98 SE Only)

     The drive enclosure comes with: A users manual, warranty registration card, drivers for Windows 98, an AC adaptor, a 5 foot USB 2.0 cable, a 6 foot eSATA cable, a SATA to eSATA port adapter, two vertical brackets and four soft feet for horizontal stacking.

     Out of all of the devices, I find the drive enclosures to be the least attractive.  The front of the drive is dominated by three red drive activity lights and three blue power lights.  The lights are all about an inch tall and light up in an all or nothing scheme.  Compared to the smaller LED style lighting on the rest of the devices, these look a bit old school big.  I would have been just as happy with a set of smaller matching LED lights and more venting on the front surface.  More on those in a minute.

     The back of the enclosure features (from left to right): A 30mm active cooling fan, an on/off toggle switch, an eSATA Port, a USB 2.0 port and a DC power port.  The power can come from the included power adapter or directly from the Ultra stackable 180-Watt Multi-outlet DC 12V Power Center. 

The install:

     Installing a SATA drive in the enclosure is pretty easy to do.  Simply remove cover to reveal the plastic hard drive brackets.  There were no screws installed right out of the box though normally two screws are used to hold the cover in place.

     Here you can get a better look at the 30 mm fan found in each drive enclosure.  During testing the fan never got louder than the case next to it and with only the Stackables on he volume was about what I would expect from a 500 W plus power supply.

     I installed a western Digital 74 GB Raptor I have been using for testing to see how the enclosure would run.  As you can see in this picture the drive sits in the bracket upside down and will be held in place by three mounting screws.  The cable runs are quite short and put a slight amount of strain on the ports for my Raptor.  I would suggest taking the mounting of the ports easy to avoid breaking a SATA or Power port.

Performance:

     With the drive in place I took a quick USB test with HDTACH  to validate drive performance.  Although the drive is not part of the review, it is always good to make sure the performance is moving as fast as can be expected to insure the controller is up to par.  As you can see here the drive performs at an adequate speed showing that the enclosure is passing the signal with little or no interference by the controller.  This is especially important as I routed the signal through the Stackable USB hub and the Ultra USB Buddy.  Of course eSATA performance will be even better but this represents the lowest performance you should expect with a modern SATA drive.