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Product Application:

2.5" External Hard Drive Enclosure
Product Provided by: ineo

Available at:

2CoolTek

Estimated Online Price:

$22.95

Availability:

Now

Review by:

Joe

Edited by:

Scott

Review date:

07/31/2008
 

Performance:

To test the performance of the ineo enclosure, I used the two most common hard disk benchmarking tools, HDTune and HDTach.  My current testing rig is as follows:

CPU: Q6600 @ 3.6GHz, 1.475V
Motherboard: DFI Lan Party P35-T2R
GPU: OCZ 8800GTX, 648MHz-1674MHz-1050MHz
RAM: 4x1GB OCZ Platinum, DDR2-800, 4-4-12,  2.1V
Case: Danger Den Torture Rack
Sound: X-Fi XtremeMusic
 Cooling: Swiftech H20-220 Compact
Hard Drives: 1x500GB Seagate Barracuda
2x150GB Raptor X
PSU: Corsair 1000HX

The drive I will be using for the testing is a Seagate Momentus 7200.2 160GB drive.

HDTach:

Much like most other enclosures, the ineo enclosure easily maxes out the USB2.0 bus.  The absolute maximum spec for the USB2.0 bus is 480Mbps (60 MB/s), but much of that is lost to overhead. 

HDTune:

HDTune Read test reiterates the same story, in that the USB2.0 standard is the bottleneck for the system. 

The write speed is also typical of most USB2.0 external hard drives.  Here we are capped at around 26MB/s, with a burst of 27.6MB/s.  That just screams of bottleneck. 

Conclusion:

The ineo NA203 High Speed 2.5" External Hard Disk Enclosure is a handy tool to keep in your toolbox, because you never know when you need to backup a laptop.  It is hard to argue with USB, since 99.999% of PCs are equipped with it, even if the aging bus is hurtful to performance.  With that being said, it is a no-brainer that this unit connects via USB, however, I would also have liked to seen either an eSATA or Firewire connector as well. 

Other than that issue, the enclosure itself is very attractive, easy to store away, and the completely screwless installation makes drive swapping completely painless, and for that reason alone, this enclosure will have a permanent home in my toolbox.  

Performance: 3 out of 5

Innovation:

4 out of 5

Quality:

4 out of 5

Stability:

5 out of 5
Aesthetics: 4 out of 5

Software/Drivers Pack:

N/A

Overclocking:

N/A
Value: 3 out of 5

Project Skill Level
(5 being most difficult)

1 out of 5

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