SuperSpeed USB (otherwise known as USB 3.0) is a new standard for PC peripheral connectivity. Although Intel has been hesitant to make this interface truly standard, more and more vendors are including the technology on their motherboards, and you can even purchase add-on cards to upgrade your current system. The increase in data transfer naturally lends itself to increased hard drive performance, and PC equipment manufacturers are now revealing hard drive enclosures featuring USB 3.0. Rosewill has been making good PC peripherals for several years, including external hard drive enclosures. They have recently introduced their RX358 USB 3.0 hard drive enclosure, which promises the ease of USB with the data capabilities of SATA.
Specifications
- Material: Full Aluminum Cover, metal tray
- Dimensions: 7.59″ x 4.92″ x 1.77″
- Internal Interface: SATA I/II
- Fan: 1 x 80mm cooling fan (Internal Tray)
- Model #: RX-358-U3B
- Item #: N82E16817182210
On the next page we take a look at what you get…
Inside the cardboard box is the enclosure itself, a blue USB 3.0 cable, an AC adapter, a small bag of screws and a small paper manual. The USB 3.0 cable differs slightly than a typical USB cable. This is a Type “A” connector to type “B” connector, but the “B” portion of the cable is taller to accomodate the extra tiny pins used by the 3.0 plug. The “A” portion of the connector has the same form factor as a USB 2.0 cable, but has 5 extra pins near the back of the plug.
The enclosure looks rather industrial. It has an aluminum top with an 80mm exhaust hole cut out of the top, which is covered in black mesh. The top is secured to the main chassis with four phillips-head screws. The bottom of the enclosure has been left off, to provide easy access for your first installation.
The front of the enclosure has black mesh, which allows for easy airflow. Flanking both sides of the font are two blue LEDs; one to indicate power and the other to indicate drive activity. The back of the enclosure has a single USB 3.0 port, a fan toggle switch, a 12V DC input, and a main power switch.
Wires run from the controller to the LEDs along the sides
The sides of the enclosure are covered by two black plastic pieces. Once these pieces are slid out you can see rails that look pretty standard for any hard drive mount. Along both sides of the rails are wires that run from the rear control board to the front LEDs. The wires are held in place with invisible tape.
The naked enclosure and Asmedia ASM1051 bridge chip
The control board looks pretty stanard. It has a single “slide-in” SATA connector, with both power and data leads integrated. The controller chip is a Taiwanese Asmedia ASM1051 controller bridge, which translates SATA commands to USB 3.0. The cooling fan is a low-profile 80mm fan, which has been positioned to blow air over your hard drive rather than exhaust air from the cage. The air pressure created is released from the vented front.
Plop ‘n’ Play… after you secure with screws
Installation is pretty straightforward. All you do is plop down any standard 3.5″ hard drive device (up to 2 terabytes) and slide into the connector. You secure the drive to the side rails with the included screws, just as you would in a standard PC case. Once the drive is secure, the plastic rails are slid back into position and secured on the back plate. With this in place you can place the bottom aluminum plate and secure with the included screws. This is pretty standard stuff, but we’ve seen enclosures that had completely screwless installations or minimal movement. Installing a drive isn’t a big deal and can honestly be done in less than a minute.
We tested this enclosure with a Seagate 7200.10 250GB SATA Hard Disk Drive. The enclosure was connected to our Vantec SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Host Controller (reviewed here). We used the included USB 3.0 cable, as well as a standard USB cable to test USB 2.0 throughput. Below are the specifications on our test machine:
- Intel Q6600 Core 2 Processor
- Seagate 7200.10 250GB SATA HDD
- Vantec SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Host Controller (review here)
- Rosewill USB 3.0 Hard Drive Enclosure (read our review here)
- Asus P5W-Deluxe motherboard
- 8GB OCZ DDR2-1000 memory
- Sapphire Radeon ATI 4870 Toxic Video Card (read our review here)
- Asus Xonar PCIe sound card
- Windows 7 (64-bit)
Our Seagate drive was placed in a new Rosewill USB 3.0 hard drive enclosure, which was used for both USB 3.0 and 2.0 testing. The same drive was connected directly to the motherboard’s SATA port to determine the maximum throughput the drive can deliver. Although the Seagate hard drive is only 250GB, the 7200.10 series uses perpendicular technology, which packs more bits into the same amount of space, which translates into higher throughput per platter spin. Just for kicks and giggles we tried other hard drives we had laying around, but the 7200.10 drive provided the best output in these tests. Any hard drive can easily saturate the bandwidth of USB 2.0, so we used the fastest drive we could to demonstrate if there was a limit to what USB 3.0 could provide.
We used the ATTO becnhmark as well as Simpli Software’s HDTach 3.0.1. ATTO shows how the drive performs with different file sizes, and HDTach has a good picture of the drive speed with the platter. Once we powered on the drive, Windows 7 immediately recognized it and assigned a drive letter, just as you expect with any USB drive.
We measured the drive’s temperature with a thermal probe to see how effectively the fan works at cooling your drive. As we noticed during installation, no aluminum actually touches the drive, so it is really up to the fan to disapate heat. With the fan off our test drive reached a max temperature of 102 degrees, which cooled down to 86 degrees with the fan on. The ambient room temperature was 76 degrees. The fan is apparently very effective, and is so whisper quiet that you can barely notice it.
Left: SATA, Middle: USB3.0, Right: USB 2.0
When we used HDTach we could see how the drive performs as the head moves across the platters. It doesn’t take much to saturate USB 2.0’s bandwidth, so nearly every hard drive should max out anywhere between 25 to 30MB a second, which is what we see when we run the enclosure on USB 2.0. When we run the drive on USB 3.0 we can see that the drive does not max out the bandwidth, as the transfer rates have a natural curve as the head moves across the platter. The drive has a slightly less average transfer rate under the SuperSpeed interface than on SATA, but it appears that the drive does not max out the bandwidth and therefore there is room to spare.
Seagate 7200.10 drive on all three interfaces
We also tested the same hard drive under the motherboard’s internal SATA chipset and benchmarked under ATTO. The hard drive reached a read speed of 56MB a second and a write speed of 78MB/second. This is a little odd, as usually read speeds are much faster, but nevertheless the drive achieved write speeds up to 78MB/second.
SATA slightly edges out USB 3.0, but not by much
You can perform most common tasks just like you would an internal hard drive. One thing we noticed was that you cannot read SMART information from the drive, which includes reporting the drive’s internal temperature. This isn’t a big deal, as you couldn’t do this with USB 2.0 either. Either this feature isn’t supported in the USB 3.0 specification, or isn’t translated by the SATA-USB chips.
Judging the value of this type of device is a little tricky at the time of this writing. If your purpose is the most performance for the buck, then you can buy an enclosure with eSATA support for around $20, but you don’t get the conveniences of USB 3.0. If we are strickly comparing apples to apples, then we must only compare this product only with other USB 3.0 enclosures. Going by that rule, the Rosewill RX358 is on the low end of other SuperSpeed HD cases (which retail between $50 and $90) at a retail price of $60. You may be used to seeing hard drive cases hovering between $30 and $40, but if you absolutely have to have one with USB 3.0, then the Rosewill RX358 is one to consider.
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