Introduction:

Anyone who carries around their internal drives a lot should consider an external enclosure to protect the drive against the rigors of travel. External enclosures allow users to place internal devices such as hard drives and CD burners inside the enclosure and convert the IDE to USB 2.0 or Firewire so that you may use the device externally and benefit from its great portability. The external enclosure I will be testing today is the Cool Max 3.5-inch/5.25-inch aluminum enclosure CD-510B series.

Features:

I will begin with examining the construction of the enclosure. The frame and metal tray are both constructed out of black-colored aluminum. I feel that Cool Max did an exceptional job on the construction of the enclosure and it seems very durable and solid, although dropping it is still not a good idea. The enclosure implements a USB2.0 interface although it is fully backwards compatible with USB 1.1 albeit with a slower speed. If you are running USB 2.0, you should experience data transfer rates of up to 480bps. The enclosure is compatible with hard drives, CD-ROMs, CD burners, DVD-ROMs or DVD writers. If you plan to use a hard drive in this enclosure, you will not need a side bracket, as this external device cage merely converts the ATA connection into USB2.0. Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP and Mac OS 8.6 or higher are supported. To keep the components that you place inside cool and stable, there is a 4cm cooling fan located at the rear. The connections on the rear of the enclosure include a stereo earphone jack, USB 2.0 connection, and a power connection. Also included is a USB 2.0 cable, screws, and a 100~240V/12V – 1.7A power adapter.