Product

The actual enclosure is a very attractive and well built unit. The inner frame and main part of the body is constructed from aluminum with the end caps made from plastic. The unit is structurally very strong, with standing me toting it around for a long period of time. The EHD-350 can withstand the rigors of being a portable unit; even after I dropped it twice (for testing of course) I was left with only a couple of scratches and a minor dent which I pushed back out with a pair of pliers. It includes a snap out carrying handle on the end which is very useful and prevents you from dropping the unit. Enermax also included a molded plastic stand, which keeps the EHD-350 held vertical on your desk and out of the way.

Because the enclosure can take a 3.5" hard drive which is usually powered off of the 12 volt line in your system and sadly a standard USB port only supplies 5 volts, an external power supply unit is included. The power supply is split into two parts. The first a short cord which plugs into your wall socket, with the second being a small black box with a much longer cord coming out of it which connects to the back of the EHD-350. The connector on the outside looks very similar to a PS2 connector, although the pins are different.

The front of the unit is made from plastic where the center section is removable to allow for the installation of a zip drive or any other 3.5” device that you need external access. One piece of the grill sadly broke in two the first time I dropped it, but after much thought I decided to at a later date just replace it with some type of mesh.

The rear of the EHD-350 is where the power cable and included USB 2.0 cable are plugged into. There is also a circular pattern of holes drilled through the plastic which I believe are for ventilation. With the enclosure being made out of aluminum it acts as a large heat sink surrounding your hot hard drive. Overall the unit would get warm but never really hot. Even after leaving the drive running for at least an hour with data being transferred to the Seagate 7200Rpm drive the enclosure was still only warm to the touch. Not enough to cause any problems to the drive.

Installation

Installation was a breeze. All you have to do is unscrew the two rear Phillips head screws. You can then just grab the handle in one hand and the rest of the device in the other and slide the two apart.

Inside is the aluminum frame where you 3.5” device (in my case a Seagate Barracuda 80GB 7200RPM hard drive) is screwed into place using the same screws you would in a normal installation into your computer case.

You then connect the short IDE and power cable to the drive, slide the two pieces together and reinstall the two screws and you’re done. In total, it took under 10mins to install the drive and have it powered up and ready to be formatted.

This is where the fun began. In the instructions it points out that you need to run Fdisk on the drive before you format it, hinting at that you can only use the enclosure with a FAT32 formatted hard drive. Do you know how hard it is to get an 80GB partition formatted in FAT32 in Windows XP? Well I will just say that it is basically impossible unless you use (which I ended up doing) a program like Partition Magic. If your wondering, Microsoft decided to edit the format command just a little in Windows 2000 and XP, making it so that if you decide to format a partition larger than 32GB FAT32, it will act like it is formatting and do all the normal stuff, but after it is done give you an error saying the drive is too large for FAT32 and recommend formatting it NTFS. So really to use this enclosure have a Windows 98 machine handy or use a program such as Partition Magic. Once that fiasco was completed I was on to test the enclosure’s capabilities.

Benchmarking

Test Setup:

Asus A7N8X Deluxe nForce2
AMD Tbred 1700+ JIUHB
1024MB Corsair PC4000
Western Digital Cavier SE 80GB
Seagate Barracuda 80GB
Windows XP SP1
Startech USB 2.0 add-on card (more on this later)

Asus P4GE-VM
P4 2.4 GHz 533FSB
256MB PC2100
Seagate Barracuda 40GB
Seagate Barracuda 80GB
Windows XP SP1

I ran into a major issue with this enclosure when I went to test it. It seems that the controller chip it is based upon (Genesys Logic GL811) conflicts with the USB 2.0 controller on my nForce2 motherboard. After some extensive research, much hair pulling, and a couple of late nights I was able to come to this conclusion. Even though this chip is supposed to be “highly compatible” it does not work with the onboard USB 2.0 controller on all nForce2 motherboards. What happens is the device recognizes fine, the drivers install properly and the drive shows up in my computer, but when you try and transfer data to it the device will disconnect. To be more specific, files under 20MB will transfer fine to the drive, but anything over 20MB will cause the device to say it cannot find the source file and disconnect. When this occurs though, strangely, the EHD-350 still shows activity occurring, even though nothing is being copied or written. In order to get the drive to show up again you have to disconnect it from the power source and the USB cable (which according to the manual is a big no-no when the activity light is on because your hard drive could be damaged) then wait a few moments and reconnect it. Let me tell you that it was a big and I mean big hassle. In order to get around this I had to use my USB 1.1 hub. Using the drive at USB 1.1 speed and transferring data is not very fun, especially large amounts of data. The problem continued on even after I purchased an add-on USB 2.0 card. With the add-on card the device would not recognize as a USB 2.0 device. So I ended up having to give up on the nForce2 and try it on the Asus P4GE-VM board with a Pentium 4 2.4GHz processor. As soon as I plugged in the EHD-350 it recognized properly, and ran at USB 2.0 speeds. So the further benchmarks were taken off of the P4 system.

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