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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.
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Vantec EZ-Swap Mobile IDE Rack: 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.
