If you’re a gearhead like me, then you’re probably upgrading, repairing, or otherwise messing with internal hard drives all the time. It can be a pain to constantly open your case, and you don’t want an ugly open box in the middle of your room. If only there was a way to easily connect hard drives to the computer from the front panel…
VIZO Technology has invented a front panel to address this very issue! It supports every ATA technology currently available, classic parallel ATA, SATA I & II, and e-SATA. All of these connections are handled through an onboard controller chip and connects to your computer’s internal SATA port. This device should help save us some valuable connection and configuration time, so we were eager to test this panel out.
About VIZO Technology
VIZO Technology Corp. mainly provides computer peripheral products to everywhere all over the world. We own the best team and complete innovation technology. Utilizing experiences for many years and sufficient skills, VIZO insist in developing innovative and nice quality products to meet mainstream users’ demands. VIZO supply the PC users variety of PC DIY products and peripherals, include Hard Drive External Enclosure, Multimedia storage, front panel, mouse, case fan, uv LED fan, system cooling, cold cathode light, crystal neon night, accessory, etc.
VIZO leads the trend of PC DIY and peripheral market; meanwhile, VIZO produce UV and LED effect products which can make your PC more stylish and unique.
VIZO aim at non-stop improvement, continuous innovation, excellent design , firm development, and quality-improving technology. This is also the main reason for VIZO to keep putting all our effort in investigation and development. In order to being a leader in this high competitive field, VIZO requires the strict quality control process and highly recommended global product approval.
Our Target is to let all the customers and end users acquire that VIZO equals to innovation, high quality, fast response and good service. We aim at achieving each customer’s satisfaction with our best quality. We also hope all the customers and end users can happily enjoy VIZO products!
The Product:
I received the product and the packaging is simple and informative. All of the product specs are on the back of the box. The Master Panel can be easily seen through the window on the front of the box.
Here are the specs for the Master Panel, as stated by VIZO:
|
||||
On initially examining the packaging, I thought it was rather hokey that VIZO had edited the specs on the back of the box by covering them with black stickers, and in the case of performance edited the SATA spec by printing on the black tape. They completely covered the statement “S-ATA does not support MAC”. Apparently the packaging was originally supposed to include an IDE cable as well, and that was edited out. On opening the package, I found everything that was supposed to have been included to be present.
The MasterPanel was really easy to install into my computer. I just had to pop out the one front access panel cover I had left and put in four screws. Attaching the device to the system board was just as easy. The MasterPanel utilizes three SATA connectors to bring the functionality of your motherboard to the front of your case. If you are not planning on using the eSATA interface, you can easily leave that connector disconnected, decreasing the demands on your motherboard SATA connectors to two. The ATA interface on the front of the panel utilizes an SATA connector and has a built on SATA-to-ATA bridge chip to convert the signals.
After I got the MasterPanel mounted, the two SATA cables installed (I chose to not connect eSATA) and the floppy style power plug attached, I was ready to start testing. Total installation time was just a few minutes. Without any drives attached, I powered up my computer, followed by the MasterPanel. This is when my frustration started. During POST, my SATA controlled reported a “device configuration error”. I was stumped. I had not done anything besides install the MasterPanel and power on everything. After this error, my computer would not boot and just stayed on the SATA error screen. I powered off the MasterPanel, and hit RESET on my computer. The computer booted flawlessly.
Thinking the first error was a fluke, I restarted the computer, and powered on the MasterPanel again. I received the same error message. I thought “maybe the ATA port on the MasterPanel does not like the SATA controller it is on”, so I powered everything down, opened my case again, and switched the SATA connector to another port on my motherboard. I powered up everything again and received the same error. Again, I powered off the computer. Time for another test. I retrieved the ATA-133 drive I was going to be testing with, attached the external power cable to the front of the MasterPanel, attached an IDE cable to the MasterPanel and the drive, and again powered on everything. This time I received no error message and the computer booted into Windows without a problem. Now I have learned that if I have the MasterPanel turned on and want to boot my computer, I MUST have an ATA drive attached to the ATA port on the front, or have the SATA port disabled in the BIOS. This is not stated anywhere in the manual. To test this theory yet again, I once more powered down the whole system. I opened the case, and again switched the ATA port to a different SATA controller port on the motherboard. I disconnected my external ATA-133 drive and powered up. Again with the “configuration error” message. So the theory is now proven fact in my mind. My guess is that this has to do with the SATA-to-ATA bridge chip.
Now that everything was up and working, I began testing the performance of various drives on the MasterPanel using HDTach. The ATA drive I have chosen to test with is a ATA-133, 200GB, 7200 RPM Western Digital with 8MB cache. I sent HDTach through it’s paces with this drive. Test results for this drive were slightly lower attached to the MasterPanel verses attached directly to the motherboard, not enough that you would truly notice though.
My next test was with a Western Digital 160GB SATA-II drive with 16MB cache. First, I had to go into my BIOS, disable the controller that the ATA port was on, and then I could test the SATA drive. My controller only supports SATA-I, so I had to set the drive to 150MB. The results were the same on the MasterPanel as plugged directly into the motherboard.
My frustration with this device was that I could not leave the ATA port attached without disabling one set of SATA controllers in the BIOS, which makes the whole point of this device moot. Why should I have to enable/disable a portion of my BIOS just to pull data off of an ATA drive? Seems kind of silly to me. The external SATA ports don’t go through a bridge chip, ensuring that the performance is the same as when plugged into the motherboard. The ATA drives have a minor performance hit (about 1%) when attached to the MasterPanel, which is not really enough to notice. I was not able to test the claim of Hot Plug ability as I do not have a controller that supports this feature.
| WD 200GB ATA-133 | WD 160GB SATA-II |
Overall, the VISO MasterPanel is a well designed and potentially very convenient product for a techie type (geek) person who likes to work on their friends systems or is in the data recovery business and needs an easy way to attach drives to their system…or is just too cheap to buy an external hard drive.
Side Note:
It is possible that the MasterPanel had issues with the built on SATA ports on my Asus A8V Deluxe. I did not have another SATA card to plug into the system to test this. One is the SATA controllers is a VIA RAID Capable controller, which is my primary HD controller. The other is a Promise 378 TX2, configurable for RAID or IDE operation. I tried the Promise controller in both modes with the ATA port, but neither worked.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
1 Comment
I've been waiting a long time for someone to come up a product like this where can I Purchase this item, I need one right now.