Introduction
It's a well known fact that no matter how much storage you have, you'll always find a way to fill it. This is true for both fixed and removable storage. As we continue to expand our internal storage capacity, we need bigger external drives to shift data around, or to store backups in a safe location. Over the past two years or so, external hard drive enclosures have become an increasingly popular way of doing this.
When the capacity of a flash drive just isn't enough, you can purchase an external drive enclosure and use a drive with a bog-standard interface within it, all thanks to nifty IDE to USB/Firewire bridging chips, or the not-yet-as-popular eSATA interface. There are numerous flavours of drive enclosure on the market now. Some are NAS wannabes, others cheap as chips 3.5" disk enclosures, and then some slightly more specialist offerings.
Today we're taking a look at two enclosures from Ultra. One is a 3.5" enclosure with USB and Firewire - one which would go up well against the Icy Box, which we reviewed some time ago. The second is a slimmer model for 2.5" laptop drives with just a USB interface.
Anyway, the more I rattle on with introductions, the fuller your hard drives become, so let's get to the meat of the review, shall we?
