| SilverStone Treasure TS07 USB 3.0 Enclosure |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Storage | |
| Written by Marc Fruchtman | |
| Wednesday, 12 October 2011 | |
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Closer Look: InteriorThe inside of the SilverStone Treasure TS07 is completely black anodized. All of the edges were finished. There were no sharp edges. Once you open the case, the tray is revealed.
The tray is designed to fit only 3.5” drives. It is possible to insert a 2.5” SATA drive but there are no built in methods for holding a 2.5” drive in place. The orange mounting bracket is rotated and then the pins insert into the standard screw holes located on the sides of the drive. The mechanism is very easy to use and locks in place with a good solid feel. The tray itself is designed to prevent accidental reverse mounting of the drive. Here we see the electronic components of the USB enclosure:
Components are placed on both sides of the PCB.
Readers already familiar with many of the USB 3.0 enclosures will recognize the asmedia ASM1051E. This popular chip is found on many enclosures to bridge USB 3.0 and 2.0 to serial ATA.
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Comments
Modern mechanical drives will soon reach over 200MB/s STR so this enclosure will be a bottleneck for new huge drives.
THanks for the review!
PS: Does it support drives larger than 2TB drives? I see a lot of enclosures on newegg that say they only support up to a 2TB drive, however I thought the only hardware limitation is LBA, and 48-bit LBA has been around for like 10 years now so all enclosures should support 48-bit LBA.
Maybe it's because of the microprocessor's internal firmware that some enclosures have this limitation.
Personally I prefer a hard drive dock/caddy so you can plug hard drives in and swap them out for other hard drives. Cost about the same too.
While a dock is very useful, it does not protect the drive.
Docks are great for SSDs and drives that are already protected.
Most 3.5" drives have exposed electronics, making it pretty useless for a dock.
I have found that my hard drives require basically zero added protection. I have bought a couple of $2 cases for them to use while they're not plugged in (thus offering just as much protection as an enclosure). This is vastly superior to having a single drive enclosure for every hard drive. Add to this that many cases now come with hot swap bays, and often I can just bring a hard drive to a client or friend and it will just plug into their system. It's also less expensive to just purchase another hard drive over another complete enclosure, and I don't have the added mess of multiple power supplies and multiple USB cables. It's way easier to pull a hard drive and plug another in compared to having to pull out another enclosure and power brick and plug them in.
It's FAR from useless for 3.5" drives.
I am not sure I understand your $2 cover idea...
Your removing the cover when you plug them in?
I don't think that is a very good idea for "Most Users".
Its fair to say, that it is useful to have a docking station for hard drives that are protected. If you can get $2 covers for your hard drives that also work during docking, then a docking station does make good sense. Otherwise, its just a failure waiting to happen for the "average user". Perhaps you are willing to take that risk.
The ease of use of a docking station with "protected" drives is apparent.
Your situation applies to a very small segment of people who happen to have hot swap bays. For the general population who don't even open their cases, a USB enclosure makes a lot of sense.
I would even say HD "Enclosure" with a docking station makes sense.
But a bare drive, that you need to expose and dock... really ?