Metal Gear Box Hard Drive Enclosure Review

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I don’t really get excited about hard drive enclosures. They tend to be more function and not much form. But the Metal Gear Box Substance II enclosure is great. Now, I will say that I replaced a horrid enclosure. That enclosure was cheap, noisy, and flaky. This enclosure is pretty different.

First, the enclosure is made of metal. It has two porous sides and a nice, sturdy chassis. The unit uses those holes and the chassis for heat dissipation. So, this unit is basically silent, except for hard drive access. So, if you want a super quiet setup, insert a drive that is quiet too. Believe me, some drives are unbelievably noisy. Now, as for hard drive interface. Make sure that your hard drive interface and the enclosure drive interface are the same. If your drive is a SATA drive, get the metal gear box with the SATA interface. If your drive is IDE, get the IDE interface.

Assembly on this thing was easy. The drive fits snugly into the enclosure, which you want. You wouldn’t want your drive moving around in that thing. It took me a couple of minutes to get it together. The drive sides mount with hand screws. Very easy to put together. Now, different models have diffent IO on the back. Some have eSATA, where you can plug in an external SATA drive to expand storage. Mine has 2 Firewire ports and a USB 2.0 port. And the electrical jack is like an S-Video port. So it’s not your standard computer jack. And it has a power brick attached to that line.

The drive just looks cool. I got the black enclosure. I love the contrast with the blue underlight. The light pulses to hard drive acccess. I would have preferred something a little more subtle, but I’ll take it. Also, I would have preferred a stand that was a little wider. It seems a little too easy to knock it over IMHO. But the difference between my last enclosure and this one isn’t even a comparison. A super quiet, sleek, functional box that does what it’s supposed to do. I’ll give that 5 stars.

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