Installation

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One thing I have always liked about Silverstone drive enclosures is their bundled USB Y-cable.  They ensure that the drive will get sufficient power, regardless of how old or powerful your system is.  With the Raven RVS01 though, they take it a step further by including a DC plug as well.  This comes in handy when choosing to run it in eSATA mode.

Now, installing this drive just couldn't be any easier and there is actually not much to cover.  It is completely tool-less.

Simply slide the drive into its connector by expanding the two side support brackets slightly outwards.  Once you have the drive properly connected, those side brackets will "lock" into place. 

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What I did like is that despite its truly tool-less design, the drive does indeed lay securely in place.  This is aided by two notches on the top part of the enclosure that also functions as a lock, solidly positioning the drive in its final resting place. 

If you are installing an existing drive, that's pretty much it for the installation.  If you are installing a brand new drive like I have done here, there's just a few other steps to take in terms of configuring the drive for use.  Simply go to Disk Management in Windows and you should see your new drive listed.  You'll need to create a volume and format the drive before it is fully functional.

Performance

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For the performance of this enclosure, I acquired a brand new Western Digital Scorpio Black 160GB drive.  These drives are excellent, as they run at 7200rpm and managed to stay very cool and quiet.  While I personally prefer a select few 2.5" drives from Hitachi and Toshiba, these Scorpio Black drives from WD are some of the fastest on the market.

While performance will greatly depend on your system hardware and configuration, I wanted to run some tests in order to show you the major difference between its performance in USB2 and eSATA modes.  For these tests, I decided to use only one very reliable tool I have used quite often here.  This excellent utility is none other than HD Tune.  For those unfamiliar with this small yet practical utility, it is a tool primarily designed to measure hard disk performance. What's nice about this tool is that it is similar to Nero's CD-DVD Speed in the sense that it will provide you with a clear look at how the disk "behaves" during the entire testing process.

The results here were quite impressive in eSATA mode.  You can clearly see the significant difference in performance.  I love eSATA and use nothing but this interface in my large storage solutions for my HTPC.  It is clearly in a level of its own in terms of performance.  However, while you are looking at practically double the average speed and triple the maximum speed, the drive did struggle heavily during testing and just wasn't as consistent as it was when running in USB2.  If you would like to see how the drive "behaved" from beginning to end, please refer to this screenshot.  Finally, take a look at the burst rate in eSATA mode.  An impressively high 91.9MB/s.

Next: Conclusions