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| Coolermaster X Craft External Hard Drive Enclosure Review |
| Written by Maxit | |||||
Price: £30 - enclosure only Supplier: Coolermaster Manufacturer: Coolermaster Shop for Coolermaster Products. Recently purchased a Coolermaster X Craft HDD enclosure? Have your say down in the MaXit forums. Think Coolermaster and probably the first image to pop into your head will be a finely crafted aluminum case. Attention to detail, quality and stylish hardware have made Coolermaster the favourite choice of enthusiasts around the world. With product lines ranging from cases, power supplies, liquid cooling and fans, the XCraft represents the latest component addition to their pedigree stable.  Click to enlarge picture
Each model supports 3.5" IDE hard drives up to 500GB or eSATA drives up to 500GB and 10,000 rpm. The built-in USB 2.0 hub with MultiTRAK technology provides maximum performance to limit wastage of the 480Mbps transfer rate. Other features include Press and Go backup to allow easy protection of valuable data, tool free assembly and a clever cooling design to maximise air flow around the hard drive.  Click to enlarge picture Key Features and Specifications
Coolermaster sent the 3.5" eSATA/USB 2.0 model in silver out to MaXit HQ. The packaging is top notch with a stylish box showing off installation, features and the unit itself.   Click to enlarge The box contains everything needed to install and run a single hard drive including a 5/12v power brick, enclosure stand, USB and SATA cables, SATA II port connector, Windows 98 driver and software cd and user manual. 
Installing a hard drive is easy with the tooless design Coolmaster opted for. Just press the switch in at the front, pop off the lid, connect up the drive and mount it on top of four spring loaded posts, clip the lid back on and it's ready to go. The spring loaded posts are a neat touch helping to reduce vibration and noise from the hard drive while providing shock-proof protection. The lid even contains a thermal pad to aid heat transfer. Once powered up, you'll notice the blue led lighting up the Coolermaster logo on the front of the unit. A great touch adding real class to the design.  Testing BayIn use the enclosure didn't disappoint. A 200GB Western Digitial 7,2000rpm 8Meg Cache hard drive was installed into the XCraft and the unit was connected via the eSATA connection to a spare SATA port on an Asus A8N32 ALI Delux motherboard. The hard drive was added under Windows XP and assigned a drive letter and formatted as normal. Real world performance during heavy photoshop useage was on par with the rest of the internal hard drives in the system . The external enclosure provided snappy response when dealing with large file transfers and heat temperatures for the hard drive hovered around 35 degrees during an extended session of use. If your motherboard supports it, you can hot swap XCraft drives making for a very convenient external storage and backup solution. The backup software included with the XCraft is IniBackup. Once installed from the CD, IniBackup can be activated at anytime by hitting the blue Coolermaster light at the front of the case. Source and target directorys can be set along with basic attributes. 
It gets the job done without complication but don't expect the bells or whistles found in more dedicated backup solutions.
We gave the XCraft a quick blast via USB 2.0 to see how the multitrak technology performed. The USB interface coped well during large file transfers and provided around 32MB/s sustained transfer with bursts up to 37.7MB/s under HDTach 3.0 tests. Way below the SATA connection but above our Western Digital USB 2.0 7,200 8Meg cache 250GB enclosure.  Coolermaster XCraft HDTach 3.0 Results - 32mb file  Western Digital USB 2.0 Enclosure The Western Digital USB 2.0 enclosure was on average around 2MB/s slower than the XCraft. Coolermaster have managed to squeeze every last drop of performance from the USB 2.0 interface. Impressive stuff! The Bottom LineCoolermaster have produced another fine addition to their award winning stable of hardware components. The XCraft external hard drive enclosure represents a stylish and well thought out storage solution. A great feature set with support for USB 2.0 and eSATA connections, one touch backup and hot swappable plug and play support make this a champion unit. The unique cooling design does away with the need for fans and keeps drive temperatures down during the longest sessions. The packaging oozes quality and includes all the cables needed to have the enclosure up and running in minutes. The aluminum finish is spot on and subtle touches like a cool blue led and black mesh grill add to the overall appeal. Tooless assembly, anti-shock spring loaded mounting for the hard disk and a thermal pad are the icing on the cake.Once again Coolermaster have shown the rest how things should be done. If you need a quality external storage solution, the XCraft should be top of your list. Pros
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