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Design & Features
In this section, we take a much closer look at
this exceptionally designed product. Let's start with the outside...
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**click to enlarge** |
On the front, you'll find a quality aluminum
power button and a set of LED's, all of which are blue in color to help
blend in further with most modern equipment. There's an activity LED
for all five supported hard drives and will certainly come in handy when
setting up your array. In the center, you'll find its fairly large
blue backlit LCD that does provide enough data to monitor your components.
It is accented by a mirror-like acrylic panel that looks quite nice and
ships protected with a clear film to prevent it from getting scratched.
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The DS351 has some nice cooling features.
It's most prominent is the large passive hard drive cooler that features some exposed fins
to help dissipate heat more efficiently. It is of the highest
quality and quite heavy actually. A more detailed look at it a bit
later in this section.
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To further help dissipate the heat generated
from the hard drives, both sides of the external housing has vents.
Although minor to some, this is a nice feature, especially if you plan on
taking advantage of the passive cooling.
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**click to enlarge** |
The enclosure does offer some optional cooling
as well and does sport two 80mm fan mounts on the back of the unit.
Silverstone clearly does list it as optional and
therefore, the product does not ship with any fans. Considering the
type of product that it is, I don't find this to be a bad decision on their
end. In this type of setup, the less noise, the better. Another
very important feature to note here is that this product does sport its own
built-in power supply for your hard drives.
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The only I/O port you find is right in the rear
center of the enclosure. This is where you'll connect the included
eSATA cable to your HTPC.
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Open up the DS351, and you'll immediately be impressed with what you'll find
inside. As expected, all of the components are of the highest quality
and laid out quite nicely. In fact, the only other product that
impressed me this much upon inspection happens to be their very own
TD01 HTPC water cooling kit.
My point here is...the product needs to be seen first-hand to appreciate its overall
quality and design. Let's have a much closer look at what powers it...
**click to enlarge**
Speaking of power, what makes this hard drive
enclosure highly unique is its built-in power supply. Yes, it runs
independently and does not use the power source from your HTPC to run.
The SFX power supply provides a respectable 300W of power and sports a
silent 80mm fan. I would like to emphasize on the term "silent"
because it is indeed quiet and will not be an issue in such an environment.
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**click to enlarge** |
**click to enlarge** |
The internal control board supports up to five SATA or
SATA2 hard drives and is powered by the Silicon Image Sil4726 chipset.
Right under the power supply, you'll find the small power module that
basically is designed to provide the link from the power supply to the SATA
control board and hard drives, all of which are already connected for you to simplify
installation.
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**click to enlarge** |
**click to enlarge** |
Finally we have a closer look at the large
drive cage which is designed to act as one very large heatsink, providing an
effective means of passively cooling your hard drives. The cage will
allow you to mount up to four hard drives. However, there are optional HD
mounting brackets near the rear of the enclosure to mount an additional drive if you wish to take advantage
of its maximum storage capabilities.
Additional features will be covered in the
next section...
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