Too much partying last night. Way too much. You wake up the next morning with the taste of whatever still in your mouth and your head swimming like those hot chicks in a giant martini at the Cirque du Soleil. So roll out of bed, or off the kitchen table, and step directly on your brand new laptop. Awesome. Not only that, instead of jumping right off, you get mad and kick it across the room and destroy whatever hope there was of fixing it. Now what do you do with the only surviving part of that laptop, the Hard Drive?
You grab an INEO High Speed 2.5” Enclosure. Now, when you revert back to your desktop while you wait on your new laptop to arrive in the mail, you will have portable storage for whatever you need. The INEO NA202 is a USB2.0 hard drive enclosure with hi-speed data transfer up to 480Mbps. It has a convenient USB cable that wraps around and an aluminum allow case for spectacular heat dissipation. The black and silver design was very appealing too, mostly because that’s my favorite color combo.
Let’s peek in the box. Inside you find the enclosure itself in 3 parts. The main piece, the back, and the circuit board with USB 2.0 and Power plugs. There is a small black mesh bag that is lined with a soft foam padding for carrying your case around. Inside this I found a small bag with the four screws that are used to hold this minuscule contraption together, and a strip of sticker pads to cover the screw holes.
There is also a small screwdriver included in case you ran out of Vodka. Okay, it’s an actual screwdriver for putting this thing together… or taking it apart. Then we have a manual, an installation disc, and pamphlet chock full of INEO’s other goodies.
Here’s some info available on the box:
- USB2.0 interface, transfer rates up to 480Mbps
- Fully compatible with 2.5″ SATA I/II Hard Disk Drives
- Support HDD Capacity up to 320GB
- Truly Plug and Play
- Hot Swappable
- USB Bus Powered
- LED Status Indicators
- Compact Size, Perfect for Mobile Professional
- Interface: USB2.0 for SATA I/II HDD
- Material: Aluminum Alloy
- Operating System: Windows ME/98/NT/2000/2003/XP/Vista, MAC, Linux
- Dimension (WxDxH): 90 x 140 x 20 (mm)
Okay, Don, how fast is this thing?
Hold on you overzealous jerks. Let me get the thing put together first. Installation is really pretty darn simple. You take your hard drive, you attach it to the circuit board via the SATA plug, and then you set it into the casing. The grooves at the top should line up nicely with the USB plug and power plug. Then you put the back cover on, screw it down tight, and you are ready to go.
Okay, now I can tell you if it works or not. Here’s the low down on what gear I am going to be using.
- AMD 1.6GHZ processor
- 2GB RAM
- 320GB SATA HD (internal)
- 80GB (in the INEO)
I got everything plugged in and waited for Windows to recognize and install my new gear, after which I formatted the hard drive. Now it was time for a speed test. I attempted to send 300 files, each with 5 MB of data in them, from my computer’s HD to the INEO. That’s a total of 1.5GB transferring via USB to the enclosed HD.
USB 2.0 is rated at 480mbs, but it’s rare to get that kind of speed. Here’s why. Hi-Speed USB 2.0 uses a “Master-Slave” architecture in which the computer handles all arbitration functions and dictates data flow to, from and between the attached peripherals (adding additional system overhead and resulting in slower data flow control)
Here are the results from this research. According to HDTach, I was getting an average speed of around 27mbs, with bursts around 100mbs as each file began transferring. It took about 8 minutes to transfer the full 1.5GB of files from the internal HD on my PC to the USB 2.0 HD.
Not to say that this slights the overall performance of INEO’s product. I actually found it quite nice and will continue to use it for everyday use, it’s portability being a key factor in whether I would purchase it or not.
When it comes to speed, I think I will stick with external eSATA. It’s bulky, and not quite small enough to fit in your pocket, but it is much faster. So if you must pick, be prepared to sacrifice. You’re going to lose either portability and compatibility or speed, so the choice is yours.
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