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Installation
Installation is extremely easy. Let's first take a quick look at the
hardware install.
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**click to enlarge** |
**click to enlarge** |
The
drive install consists of just two quick connections. Simply connect
the IDE ribbon cable to the drive and the long LED lead wire to the 3 pins
on the circuit board. Unfortunately, it's not a tool-free design
as the frame is held together by two screws which are provided.
While the drive does come with a driver CD, it
is not needed for those running Windows XP. The enclosure is
plug-n-play and is quickly recognized and operational. The drive will
appear under Disk Drives in your Device Manager. The only additional
steps that may need to be taken is if you install a brand new drive that
needs formatting. For our tests, I used a trusty spare WD 30GB hard
drive that already had data on it.
To compliment its high-tech design, the
enclosure features a blue LED that serves as both as a power indicator as
well as hard drive activity. The Vantec logo will blink and its
intensity depends on hard drive activity.
Performance
I will offer some performance results just so
you can get an idea of what to expect when connecting an IDE drive via USB.
Performance results will obviously vary depending on the drive used for
testing. For this article though, I'm using an older and trusty
Western Digital 5400rpm 30GB hard drive. Considering a majority of
users would probably not install a high performance drive in such an
enclosure, I thought this would be an excellent test sample.
Performance will be measure with Sisoftware's SANDRA 2005 as well as the
excellent HDTach bench tool. The hard drive was also fully
defragmented prior to testing.
SANDRA 2005 - Performance
Performance was comparable to that of a
similar 5400rpm 30GB drive. Keep in mind that you will indeed lose
some performance when connecting via USB 2.0 as opposed to IDE. Also
note that you should never use an external enclosure along with a boot drive
to load an operating system. Just for kicks, I did try this but the
drive could not keep up and would fail to load WinXP at the boot screen just
prior to the logon screen.
HDTach 3.0.1.0
Final testing was done using the very latest
build of the excellent HDTach bench tool.
With HDTach, we actually see slightly higher
performance results than those achieved using SANDRA 2005.
As you can see, they are not all too
impressive. However, these results are acceptable for portable data
storage use. For example, it took just under 9 minutes to transfer a
4.35GB backup DVD movie to a Western Digital 74GB Raptor. Not bad.
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