In Use

Powering up the system you're greeted with the LCD springing to glowing green life, displaying an at a glance host of information. Despite my crappy pictures the display is very vibrant with the text being crisp and bold to read at pretty much any angle except from below. On the LCD, we have in the top left hand section a sort of shadowed disk that during operation rotates to indicate use. Sure you could rely on the IDE LED on your case but that only tells you that a drive has been accessed, not which one. Next to this towards top centre we have the configuration display, be it master or slave. Next to this towards the right we have a little graphic of a fan, and much like the disk image this also rotates to indicate use. Far right we have a little thermometer image which displays a simple gauge of the drives current temperature in relation to the maximum temperature set for the alarm. If the overheat alarm goes off the top of the thermometer display s little puff of smoke. The main centre area of the display is reserved for the temperature which can easily be switched from Celsius to Fahrenheit with just a few touches of the 3 blue buttons below the LCD. At the bottom of the LCD we have the indications of what the buttons are used for; from left to right - set, up and finally down. For such a small screen there's a surprising amount of information on display, useful or not would be down to the individual user.

Pushing one of the direction buttons takes us to screen 2 which gives us the HUTR (HDD Usage Time Record) information, displaying the days and hours the drive has been in use. This is accompanied with a very loud "beep" from the unit to let you know audibly that a button has been pushed. The set button follows a simple wizard type interface, in that you press it and follow a preset rules type event. First choice is about your preferred temperature format, be it Celsius or Fahrenheit. Pressing the set button confirms your choice. You're then taken to the temperature detection setting screen where you can set the max temperature before the alarm goes off. Now then, this overheat alarm is surprisingly loud for such a small unit, reminding me of a one tone air raid siren. There's no way in hell you could miss it unless you were stone deaf.

One thing I should probably mention at this point is that, as obvious as it may sound, the EZ-Swap won't make your Hard Drives hot swappable. You will have to power down the system before changing drives, since this is a limitation of the IDE standard.

Testing

The Hard Drive used in the testing of the EZ Swap was my primary Master drive, a Western Digital 80gig 8meg Cache drive. I also had as the Slave drive on the same channel my old 60gig IBM 75GXP. I'm using HD Tach to test the drive speeds and temperature/fan testing was done using the LCD displays information. Ok let's see how the unit affects drive speeds, if any.

Without

With

The EZ Swap 102FD doesn't hinder the drive compared to it being directly connected to the IDE interface in the slightest, with speeds remaining the same as without the EZ Swap being used. Temperatures next.

As the graph shows, temperatures are pretty good and within specifications for such a drive. Disabling the cooling fan you can see that it really doesn't affect temperatures in any big way, with only a near 1 degree Celsius drop when being used. There is a little jumper on the back of the unit that is supposed to bypass the alarm systems, and whilst you could jumper it and then disconnect the fan permanently, this would also disable the overheat protection. The fan doesn't make much if any noise so you may as well just leave it running. Overall cooling isn't as great as say front 80mm case fans blowing on the drive, but since more and more cases are doing away with the vents for these anyway, and we are in specs for the drive, I don't see it as a big issue in regards this review.

Final Words

Hard Drive caddy's are nothing new but as with more and more items from manufacturers lately, Vantec have added a host of useful extra's to give them the edge above the competition. The LCD display is a very nice touch, looking good and displaying a nice set of information at a glance in a clear and easy format. The setting of the display is simple, as it should be. The whole front of the unit is styled very nicely with a lot of recessed features and curves.

The caddy slides in and out easily and whilst the door latch isn't the greatest it does close first time if the latch is put into the closed position before shutting the door. It does mean however you have to then partway open the latch to gain access to the 3 stage lock. At the rear, the 40mm cooling fan is in my opinion not going to do much if anything at all since the actual guide for the air to pass through is less than a ¼ of the size of the fan diameter.

The whole HDD is pretty much surrounded and touching aluminium so this might help keep temperatures down on its own. The temperature alarm is loud enough to be heard throughout my house so should be loud enough in say a server room with the air conditioning and other devices running. Being able to set the temperature maximum is good, but more so in that if it was a fixed amount that would reduce the usefulness depending on the user's situation.

The dip switches for setting the drive configuration is a great idea, saving you time having to keep removing the drive to change the jumpers, although I would suggest that new users would like more listings in the instructions for drives other than IBM or Seagate. However there is enough information in the instructions tables to logically work out the correct settings needed. The unit is quite long and in small towers could butt up easily against your motherboard, meaning that if it is installed on the same channel as another IDE device, you will have to make sure your leads can reach between the two.

As for overall usefulness, this is something that you will have to work out on your own. The unit performs excellently and looks damn good whilst doing it, but if you have no need to keep swapping drives there's no point in getting one of these. But with more and more people running multiple operating systems the benefits are obvious. You can easily place Windows on one hard drive and say Linux on another, keeping them totally separate from one another, removing any possible headaches setting up such a system.

Backing up data to another drive for safe and large storage is another possible use, saving you time burning CD's and allowing for a greater range of possibilities in your backup procedures. In a server environment having the LCD display all that useful information at a glance has obvious advantages. Another thing that should be obvious is that for true EZ Swapping you will need a second caddy, as having to keep changing the drive that's in the caddy defeats the purpose of the unit.

One thing I haven't mentioned yet is the price, which for such a product is in my opinion great. are selling these at current time of writing for , low enough to make them very good value for money considering all the plus points the product has. The bad points the unit carries are pretty much either trivial at best, or simply not a hindrance in use. Many thanks to for supplying us with the Vantec EZ-Swap Mobile IDE rack MRK-102FD-SL.

Pros
Looks dead sexy
LCD displays useful info at a glance
Easy system setup
Nice jumper configuration solution
Overheat protection
Caddy slides in and out easily
Aluminium construction could aid in cooling
The price

Cons
Only 2 drives listed for wiring instructions
Front door latch can be finicky
Need 2 units (or at least a second caddy) for true EZ swapping
Cooling fan is next to useless
Very long, could cause some people installation problems

Bottom Line
If you're looking for a Mobile IDE solution you should take a good look at this one. The LCD display information, ease of use and the price make it a winner. If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.

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