Luxon Advanced Edition - Drive Enclosure Author: faceless105 -- Posted: 2008-04-16
One of the areas that we like to draw from is external storage. This is because it can be a huge convenience, as well as a smart move to keep information stored outside of your computer. Today we'll be reviewing the Luxon Advanced Edition, external enclosure, by Vizo.
Out of the box, this enclosure looks great. The mirror finish and sharp logo will catch some attention for sure. The enclosure has a pretty simple design, and a solid feel to it. The Design has a "U" shaped aluminum plate with a plastic enclosure inside to hold the hard drive. This aluminum is a choice material because it will dissipate heat very well.
Installation is incredibly quick and easy. There are only four screws holding the enclosure together, and once removed, the plastic component comes right out. Then you simply place your SATA drive in place, screw it down, and then just screw the plastic component back into the aluminum cover.
Before I get into the first hand experience I do want to provide some specs...
Case Material : Aluminum
Host Interface: 480Mbps USB 2.0 (USB 1.1 Compatible) or 3.0Gbps High Speed external Serial-ATA ( eSATA )
HDD Type : 3.5 " SATA Hard Drive
Indicators : Blue for POWER on / Purple for file access
Available colors : Black, Blue, Silver
Dimensions : 210(L) x 125 (W) x 34 (H) mm
Now from the specs above you know this is a SATA enclosure. While you can probably find a cheap PATA drive, going with SATA will get you better speeds. It's also always better to follow tech trends. If something happens to the drive 3-5 years down the road, you might have a hard time finding a PATA drive to replace it, thus making the enclosure a fancy paper weight.
Now that I've gone over the installation it's time for some first hand usage. The first time I tried the drive I did this through USB. It's the most common interface and it's proven one of the easiest ways to test anything in the past. Since we're using a new drive in this enclosure, the first thing we needed to do was format and partition the drive. This gave me a great opportunity to take some temperature readings.
While formatting, I ran my temperature gun over the enclosure and found a fairly consistent temperature of 87 degrees Fahrenheit. The enclosure was just warm to the touch, and I was really comfortable with these temperature levels. Formatting will put your hard drive through some of the highest heat levels so this isn't something I'll come across very often through regular usage. During regular use I should be ready to expect noticeable lower temperatures.
Now for the benchmark...
The first one was testing the eSata. This gets the better speeds though I did find some unexpected problems here. A large number of SATA controllers have drivers that are pretty picky about plug and play devices. It has nothing to do with the device; this is related directly to your SATA controllers and can hopefully be resolved through a driver update. If not, the device will still work over eSata, but the mobile functionality might be cut down a bit. Luckily this enclosure also includes a USB connection. This is universal and I've never witnessed a computer with a problem picking up a drive enclosure before.
Compared to a thumb drive, the device reads 50% faster. As for mobile devices that's a great improvement. As for typical storage, it's still not bad, and would be ideal for external storage.
Using external storage is a great move in any sense. The first advantage is the convenience of portability. There's also the advantage that external storage adds as a security measure. This isn't offsite storage, but this does give you the option to take data offsite with you. Now from an economic stand point this is also a ton cheaper then portable storage such as thumb drives. Instead of paying $10-$20 per gig of storage this takes the cost to less then $1 per gig. Speed is another issue as well. There are still many places that use tape backups, but those are incredibly slow due to the medium. Compared to a thumb drive, external storage on USB alone has about a 50% speed increase. This is also restricted by the USB controller but based on benchmarks it looks like you can expect a speed increase regardless.
I'd like to thank Vizo for giving me the opportunity to review their Luxon Advanced Edition hard drive enclosure. What I really like about this enclosure is the fact that it feels very sturdy. It has a very simple design as well that's makes getting into it very easy to do. After that I really like the aesthetics looks to it. It has a nice metallic finish and a great looking logo. If anyone is considering getting some external storage, I'd definitely recommend the Luxon Advanced Ed.
If anyone has any comments or questions, I'd love to hear them :)
