Introduction
This is a brief review of the Inateck tool less disk enclosure. The enclosure was sent to me for review purposes and I wanted to try it with a standard laptop hard drive at 7200 rpm.
It spends its time installed in my ultra bay extension adapter …
Ergonomics and Installation
Nicely packaged of course. Everything is plastic wrapped for a very professional look.
Installation was trickier than I had expected. The top half of the box slides open, but the little manual does not tell you to slide the lock switch open first, so I ended up forcing it. It looked like a power switch, being right next to the LED, and was not obviously a lock.
Once that got sorted, I plugged the drive into the box and closed it, sliding the lock back into place.
I then tried plugging in the USB 3 with its proprietary shaped plug. It would not go, so I opened the box again and pulled the drive, then slid the USB 3 into the box while open. It felt clunky but it went in and after that it was smoother.
So once I got the drive in the box I plugged the box into my laptop USB 3 port and it came up instantly.
Performance Comparison
The performance in the laptop ultra bay port is far from earth-shattering:
Enter the Inateck tool free hard drive enclosure:
The enclosure on a USB 3 port is also not much to write home about, but it did outperform the ultra bay across the board, if only by a hair … maybe 1%.
Now to compare against my more powerful home machine …
First on a USB 3 hub …
About the same … I’m a tad surprised.
How about on a full USB 2 hub?
Wow … that’s pretty brutal, but then it is a USB 3 device and so should be expected to slow down on a USB 2 port. By the way, it took a long time to connect on USB 2. But it did and ran fine after that.
So how much faster is the same kind of drive as C: with a direct connection to the SATA controller?
Looks like about 30% faster to read, but somewhat slower to write. Color me really surprised …
What about comparing against a serious disk? A 3.5” Caviar Black 3 TB 7200rpm?
Faster again to read, but again slower to write in some cases. Interestingly, this disk writes faster than it reads across the board. More surprises it seems.
ConclusionPerformance is very good and while the difference between this drive and a main drive is there, it is not all that significant.All in all, this is an inexpensive solution that is light weight and looks great. |
And just for fun … my SSD C drive on the main machine …
It’s not even a fast SSD but still crushes all the regular drives …
