Installation and Interior Cont'd

The circuit board's SATA connection handles both data and power. You'll need to remove the fan plate to screw the hard drive in, but simply install four screws and connect the circuit board and you're done.

Shaking a powered on hard drive is not a good idea, but with the drive off, the hard drive did not rattle at all inside the MX-1.

Performance

Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2
Processor: Genuine Intel(R) CPU X6800
Memory: 2046MB RAM
Abit AW9D-MAX motherboard

We used a 400GB Seagate Barracuda, setup with a single partition. It was formatted with a default cluster size in NTFS. As this is not a hard drive review, we concentrated solely on raw data transfers.

We copied the contents of a Doom 3 DVD on to our test bed hard drive (a Seagate Barracuda 750GB) and in turn copied off the drive to the MX-1. We then reversed the process, reading from the MX-1.

The eSATA connection is about twice the speed in both read and write. CPU usage was also much lower, averaging 12% on writes, and 18% on reads. The USB connection was 18% write and 22% read.

Final Words

The Antec MX-1 is easily the best hard drive enclosure we've worked with. It's well built, easy to assemble and a snap to use. It's also quiet. The cooling fan is barely audible, and completely unnoticeable in with our PC on, which is also rather quiet. It is rather large, but this does add some peace of mind in that it is going to be able to withstand a bit of abuse. There also isn't much in the way of bling, but we think it looks just fine.

eSATA is certainly here to stay and it's a vast improvement over USB 2.0. While I don't see a lot of practicality in using the Antec MX-1 to store a system drive, the ultra paranoid will certainly like the idea of taking their system drives wherever they want to go.

The fact the Antec MX-1 is compatible only with SATA drives shouldn't be too much of a concern, but for those of you with a pile of IDE drives looking for a new home, you'll need to look elsewhere. That said, we think it's a great choice for anyone looking for an external enclosure and either have a spare SATA drive or can get one at a good price.