If there is one thing that every computer user could need more of it’s more storage space. Luckily these days hard drives are almost cheaper than gas (per gigabyte, that is) so it seems like a good time to fill up! However, if your like many people I know you might run into one of a few scenarios. First, you may not have space in your case for a new hard drive. Second, what if you want to carry a large amount of data around in a portable fashion? One of the better options to solve this conundrum these days is a external hard drive enclosure.
There have been a lot of different external hard drive enclosures made recently and many brands have already marketed several enclosures by this point in time. Well, many have, but not Antec. This is their first design and it looks like Antec is upping the ante by on the first go-around with their Antec Veris MX-1 Actively Cooled Hard Drive Enclosure.
Features
First off, let’s get the features out of the way, so we can know what to test and expect:
- Dual output interface – USB2.0 and eSATA (external Serial ATA) allows you to transfer data up to 480Mbps or 3Gbps respectively
- Supports up to 750G SATA hard disk drive
- Unique HDD cooler brings fresh air in and around HDD for maximum cooling to protect your valuable data
- Two layer (plastic with aluminum) upper and lower panels to absorb HDD and fan noise
- Carbon-glass filled frame to reinforce the strength of the whole enclosure
- Built-in silicone pad to absorb HDD noise
- Included USB cable, eSATA cable, and eSATA bracket to convert your PC’s internal SATA and eSATA
- Stand included
- Very quiet fan operation – under 22dBA
- Supports Windows 2000 / XP / ME / VISTA
- Blower fan keeps your hard drive cool and improves performance
- Silicone grommets to isolate drive vibrations
- Dual layer top and bottom panels absorb vibration and deaden fan noise
- Keeps hard drives up to 15°C cooler, improving the hard drives stability and lifespan
This is a very impressive feature list for a first generation enclosure. The major things to note here are the active cooling, silicone noise-reducing pad, the carbon-glass construction and hard drive cap of 750GB. The cooling is said to keep the drive “up to 15 degrees” cooler. Heat is the enemy. This is good. Noise reduction measures also bring the case in at a quiet 22 dBA. Sound is the enemy. This is also good. The carbon-glass and aluminum frame makes the case light, strong and heat conductive.
Finally, the last item on the list if the 750 GB drive limit. If you have a 1 TB hard drive, sorry sir, that’s not supported hardware. Or rather, I don’t have a terabyte drive here to try out so who knows. I can’t really see a reason for it to not work unless it’s an operating system limitation. Not to fret though as 750 GB is still a lot of space to work with. It’s not the size of the drive, it’s what you do with it! Now that we’re intimately familiar with the feature set, let’s move on to the real thing and see how it shapes up!
What’s In The Pretty Box?
The inside of the box is well packaged and upon further inspection yields everything you need to move forward with using your new enclosure:
- Power Adapter
- Line Cord
- eSATA PCI-slot cover
- eSATA cable
- USB 2.0 Cable
- Stand
- MX-1 Enclosure
- Manual
After taking a look at all the items, it’s apparent Antec didn’t cheap out on the accessories, which is what one would expect with the price tag on this enclosure. So far so good, so let’s take a look at the enclosure itself!
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First Impressions
The enclosure itself has a very rugged professional look, with enough shine and polish to stand out as elegant, but not enough that you need fear touching it and destroying its divine luster.
If you prop the case up using the included stand, it definitely brings out the better features in the case, such as the carbon-fiber frame and front LED which can be quite hard to see if the case is laying flat on it’s back. If I had to sum up this case’s looks in one short sentence, I believe it would say “I am about business” and from what we’ve gathered so far, that’s what it’s here to do. Let’s find out if it keeps to it’s word.
Install Time
The manual that comes with the device is useful, but would be easier to understand if it had pictures too. That being said, the install is straightforward with the exception of a few steps that we’ll go into a bit more detail and clarify for you below. This will also serve as a quick interior tour of the case for those that are curious.
1. Remove the single long screw from the bottom front side of the enclosure, as shown. You will then be able to slide the cover off:
As you can see, the design is relatively simple, however again we can see where the quality comes in on this product. First off the silicone ring the hard drive will sit on is very nice, as it will reduce noise. It will also function to give some seperation between the fan and the drive to allow more adequete airflow.
2. The next thing you should do is remove the two side screws near the middle of the case and disconnect the blue jumper cable. This will allow you to take the fan/PCB section out of the enclosure for hard drive mounting, like shown below:
3. Place the hard drive in the carrier and flip it over holding the drive to ensure it does not fall and break a connector in the process:
4. Populate the screw-holes and flip the tray back over.
5. Repeat step one and two to put the casing back on and you’re done!
I found this enclosure process to be a little more lengthy than most I’ve reviewed, however the time impact is negligible and would not be an issue unless you were consistently changing the hard drive that is in the enclosure.
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System Setup
For testing we used the following hardware:
- Asus A8N-E Motherboard
- AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Socket 939
- MGE 500 Watt PSU
- 2 x Trandscend 512 DDR PC-3200
- BFG Geforce 7300 GS
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 250 GB
Our operating system of choice for this test was Windows XP Pro with all the latest patches.
Performance Test
Now that everything is in place, it’s time to put this drive enclosure to the test. We’ll kick off with benchmarks using HD Tach to get some numbers for the USB speed of the enclosure. Then, we’ll measure the enclosure’s eSATA capabilities. The Seagate drive we will be using today has an approximate sustained rate of 60 MB/S when directly connected to a SATA-II interface on the Asus board. With that knowledge, let us begin the tests!
HD Tach – USB
As you can see from the above graph, the USB test is almost a completely straight line which shows us that USB 2.0 simply is not fast enough to fully utilize the full bandwidth of the hard drive. We know this because the speed of sequential reads changes across the disk platter, so if we were fully utilizing the full speed of the drive we would have some slowdown near the end of the drive platter. In other words, the line should be gradually heading downwards. USB 2.0 still manages to pull off a handsome 33 MB/s rate, which is a good speed and can be duplicated on any system with said port.
HD Tach – eSATA
Now, the eSATA connection isn’t as pervasive as USB, but as new systems roll off the assembly line, we should see it more and more on desktop and even laptop computers. Based on the graphm eSata is finally able to utilise the drive’s bandwidth enough that we can see the slowdown in sequential reads across the disk platter. This means the bottleneck is typically the disk itself, which is good because it is not the interface. So how fast does it go? On our 250 GB Seagate 7200.9 SATA Hard Drive installed into the MX-1, we topped out at 129 MB/s.How’s The Temperature In This Drive?
As an actively cooled enclosure, noise is sometimes a problem, however, the fan spins quietly and is unnoticeable against the hard drive noises. On average, we noticed a temperature drop of five degrees celsius. Since a cool drive is a happy drive, we’re pretty happy with the drop in temperature inside the MX-1.
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Final Thoughts
So, what did we think? The Antec MX-1 was not the easiest enclosure to assemble, so if your looking for something where you can quickly swap drives out all the time, this may not be the enclosure for you. However, the enclosure has a host of features not found in other products in it’s price range, namely active cooling. It is also whisper quiet and quite rugged in design – – three test drops from a meter high rendered no effect on the device, we didn’t even have to reseat the drive!
Overall, this is the drive of choice for someone who needs to tote around some serious storage space without the worry of damaging the drive, keeping it safe in operation and looking good at the same time. This enclosure has all the polish you need without the actual polish, meaning less time wiping it down to look pretty every time you touch it and more data-sharing action.
Pros
- Whisper Quiet operation
- Rugged Light-weight design
- Active fan cooling
- Can take a beating and still pass data!
Cons
- A little on the expensive side
- Setup procedure more complex than most
Overall Rating: 9.0 / 10.0
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