2.5in Enclosure - Internals
On to the inside.
Very little happening inside the 2.5" enclosure. That does mean there's very little to go wrong. How you go about installing a hard drive is blindingly obvious. Drop (well, place) the drive in the enclosure, push it onto the connector, then screw it into place.
For this review, Misco provided us with a 40GB Hitachi Travelstar drive. You'll pay around £50 for 40GB of 2.5" disk, paying more than double that if you feel like you need as much as 100GB. Clearly more expensive and less capacious than 3.5" drives, but their portability makes up for it.
With both side covers of the enclosure removed, you can see both the front and back of the drive. The fit is snug, and installation is as easy as it is obvious. The fun part is getting the covers back on...
The size of the product means that the screw holes to secure the panels are rather small, and by extension, so are the screws. It took us a while to locate a screwdriver small enough to actually get the screws to fit. You'll also have a lot of fun if you drop a screw; we suggestion getting a peon to spend a good while scouring the floor for it with a magnifying glass to hand.
Once you've endured the ordeal of screwing the panels back on, the unit feel exceptionally sturdy and well finished. In fact, it puts its bigger brother to shame, especially given that the panels are metal, which aside from looking good and adding strength, will help with heat dissipation.
Ultra have used a simple, yet clever trick to ensure that any machine should be able to power the enclosure from USB ports. The power cable can act as a run through, so you can plug both it and the data cable into the same USB port, but if that proves to be too much for the port, you can always run the two separately - powering the drive through one port and controlling the device through another. During testing we found one machine that wasn't too keen on running the enclosure with data and power cables combined, but once we'd separated them out everything was hunky dory.
First impressions of the 2.5" enclosure are generally more positive, then. It feels well made, installation is easy (until you try to tackle the insanely small casing screws) and the size of the device makes for some mega portable storage.
