Supplier: Eagle Tech
Price: $56.95	Reviewed: Nov 12, 2008

Eagle Tech iNeo NA305J Author: Gh0sTly -- Posted: 2008-11-12 Today, I bring to you one of the most awesome USB external hard drive cases I personally have ever seen, the iNeo I-NA305J, from Eagle-Tech. First thing I need to comment on is construction quality. This case is very well built, and could probably take a good thrashing and still work with no issues(sans hard drives inside.) Its exterior is built of a aluminum alloy, and is quite thick and has absolutely no flex to it. I could stand on this if I wanted to. The back plate is thick steel, and you will find your power and USB ports, as well as a power switch, fan, and fan speed selector. I was rather pleased to find a fan speed selector on this. If you are running 1 hard drive, you could be safe on low, or maybe even off, but with 2 hard drives in here, I would run at high, even though you can't tell its running. The front door of the unit is all plastic, but it doesn't feel flimsy or anything. It is hinged and lockable, and when opened it reveals 2 hard drive bays, both are SATA. You open the door and pull and it ejects the drive. I can see this being very handy for hard drive backups. If you have 2 drives in this, it acts as a JBOD case, and you can format them as 1 drive, and access it as such. When looking at the faceplate, you get a very nice blue glow from 3 LEDs on the underside of the top lip, and the black "window" houses the power indicator and directly under that you have the activity indicator. Now, we all want to know how well this performs in a real world enviroment. In the tests I will use a program called DiskBench, and the file we will be coping back and forth will be a standard Windows Vista X64 ISO(3.65gb). The disk drives inside the iNeo durring testing are 2 identical Western Digital WD5000AAKS SATA hard drives, formated as one drive inside the iNeo. Copy from C:\ to iNeo(drive I:\) Copy C:\Vista64.iso to I:\Vista64.iso Size: 3929899008 Time: 125036 ms Transfer Rate: 29.974 MB/s Copy from iNeo(drive I:\) to C:\ Copy I:\Vista64.iso to C:\Vista64.iso Size: 3929899008 Time: 116088 ms Transfer Rate: 32.285 MB/s Read from iNeo(drive I:\) [read file in blocks of 32mb] Read file: I:\Vista64.iso Size: 3929899008 bytes Time: 124271 ms Transfer Rate: 30.159 MB/s As you can see, its a rather fast USB device. It performs better than most others that I have used in the past, and it looks good doing it too. The case also supports a quick one touch backup feature, and comes with dedicated software for that. Its quick and rather painless. I had no way of timing backup, but it went smoothly. Overall, if you are looking for a way to make your own large external hard drive on the cheap, the iNeo I-NA305J is the way to go. With its ability to house two 750gb hard drives, for a total of 1.5tb, you get plenty of space, and with the prices of hard drives dropping all the time, its not going to cost a lot either. I would like to thank Eagle Tech for letting me review this amazing hard drive enclosure, and I look forward to reviewing more of their products. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask.

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