VIZO SATA Master Panel Review

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.

	REPORT CARD : VIZO Master Panel category rating comments Innovation 4 An excellent idea for those of us constantly messing with hard drives. Installation 3 Physical installation was very simple, but you may have problems booting depending on your SATA chipset, which can be a pain. Performance 5 Onboard SATA to ATA translation only takes 1% performance hit (similar to in-line translators), and SATA has no performance issues. Aethetics 4 Panel looks really good with a black, grey, or white case and has a professional build quality. Value 3 Price information is unavailable at this time, but is a good value if you can find it between $30-$40. FINAL VERDICT: 4 out of 5 stars