Rosewill RX81-MP-SC External 3.5" SATA Enclosure

Interior of the RX81-MP-SC Enclosure:

Disassembly is extremely easy, the only requirement is that you have a Phillips screwdriver with a small tip. Another extremely noteworthy bit of information, everything in this enclosure will only fit properly one way. There's no second guessing whether you re-assembled everything properly.

Installing a SATA hard drive is extremely easy, there is a fixed port that the drive simply slides into. SATA technology has made life so much easier for external enclosures than when you had to fight with old PATA drives to get all the cables connected in such a small space.

For testing I used a 1TB Seagate Barracuda hard drive. It is just your standard sized 3.5" SATA hard drive.

Test Setup & Benchmarks Used:

Performance will vary based on the hard drive in the enclosure, and the system it is connected. Our main goal in this review is ensure that all ports work as advertised, and to give a rough comparison of expected performance between the various technologies. As mentioned on the previous page, the hard drive used in the enclosure is a 1TB Seagate Barracuda.

For our testing procedure, we used Sandra XII 2008 and averaged the results from five trial runs. The two benchmarks used from Sandra were the "Removable Storage Benchmark" and the "File Systems Benchmark". These are of course synthetic tests, but they give a good indication of expected performance.

Under the device properties in Windows, the drive was set to "Optimize for quick removal", which disables write caching. Also all anti-virus and disk optimization software was disabled during the trial runs.

I used the USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and eSATA ports on the enclosure. Unfortunately I do not have any FireWire 800 capable systems, but performance can be expected to be somewhere between FireWire 400 & eSATA.