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Having not seen a picture of a Time box for quite some time before the review system arrived, that's what I was hoping not to be greeted with after removing it from its box. Time's mid tower beige box has changed little in the past few years, and with the advent of cheap, stylish aluminium chassis', available from a massive range of sources, I was hoping for something a little more glamourous than their stock beige system.
It's a steel chassis, and surprisingly heavy for its small size. Given that we live in 2003, it's certainly not a beige steel chassis circa 1997, the age of missing fingers from swapping out your motherboard, but despite a complete lack of sharp edges for me to hurt myself on, the case was still resolutely bland.
Side panel fit wasn't the greatest, requiring a silly amount of force to replace after removal, but otherwise, it wasn't too bad to work with. It just doesn't give away that it's housing all that power, that's my chief complaint. Other UK vendors go the extra mile with the case, I'd like to see Time do the same in future, definitely.
As you can see, Time take the 2 drive route with the UltraStation XP3200+, with DVD-ROM reader on the botton, and the chosen Panasonic/Matsushita 2x DVD-R drive on top.
The Panasonic drive is a UDMA66 supporting device with 2x DVD-R writing and 1x DVD-RW writing, giving you decent support for the most popular type of DVD writable media. A device supporting +R/+RW formats too, would have been nice, but 4.7GB removable optical storage is still yours for the taking.
The only other interesting thing on the front is the card reader.
Supporting Sony Memory Stick, Compact Flash (and Type-II devices like MicroDrive's), SD, MMC and Smart Media removable flash memory formats, there's a slot for everyone. The device appears to the operating system as 4 extra drives. You also get a USB port, something I was hoping to see at least two of on the front of the case, but it's better than none.
The coolest thing for me, when working with new vendor supplied hardware, is what kind of effort has gone in to fitting the components inside. Will I see missing screws? Will it look like I put the cables in? Or will it look neat, well thought out and definitely not something I'd be responsible for?
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