Eagle Consus M-Series SATA to USB External Storage Review - FastSilicon.com

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Eagle Consus M-Series SATA to USB External Storage Review

Wednesday, 30 July 2008

Page 3 of 5

What You Get

From a build standpoint, a device such as this one should be painfully simple to figure out, which indeed is the very point of such a device. Opening the box you find the actual case itself, a generic CD which contains documentation for all of the Consus line of storage devices, printed documentation, the unit's power supply and USB cable, a stand with two screws to secure it should you wish to use it vertically, and a tiny plastic key.

There's not a lot going on with the rear of the unit beyond the obvious. Here you'll find the power supply connector, the USB port, and a power switch.

The key's sole purpose is for opening the front panel on the unit, though there is nothing magical about this key itself. Should you lose this tiny plastic key, a bent paperclip will suffice in its stead. Once open, you'll notice the clever simplicity of the unit's design. The external door has a rubber bump-stop, designed to keep clamping force on a drive once its slid into place. Inside you'll notice a spring pressure mechanism, and the SATA power and data interface, designed to allow you to slide in any standard 3.5" SATA drive.

Indeed, installation of a drive is a simple affair. Just slide a drive in (with the drive oriented correctly for the SATA connections of course) close the door, and you're done. Can't beat that with a stick!

As you can derive from the internal and external pictures, this is a device without any active cooling. Though the external casing uses a mesh design, this is entirely for aesthetics as the device has no ventilation whatsoever. This shouldn't be a problem however, as the device itself is made entirely of aluminum to act as a passive heatsink. An upside to this is the fact that the device itself will be quiet, depending on the hard drive you install inside of it. In our testing you could barely hear the drive we installed inside, with the only obvious indication the drive was being used at all provided by a handy blue "glow strip" at the rear top of the unit.

Being a USB device, there was no drama involved in installation as the device is automatically detected as a USB Mass Storage Device by XP, Vista, Linux, and MacOS 10.X systems.

Now, let's move on to a few benchmark tests and give you our impressions of the device before we wrap things up here.

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