Antec Veris External Hard Drive

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bonestonne
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Antec Veris External Hard Drive

Post by bonestonne » Tue Aug 10, 2010 7:24 am

I've got several of these charmers here at work.

It's is made in several variants, you can have standard USB external drives, for most users, and you can also get these drives with eSATA. I'm about to throw a 1TB WD Green Power drive into the enclosure as soon as I transfer a couple hundred gigs of data off it (WD special formatting crap, can't read the data without using the WD parts).

Ive got a beef with these enclosures.

1) They don't make really good contact with the hard drives. There's a tiny gap between the drive and the enclosure, meaning even though it's aluminum, and would dissipate heat very well, it just doesn't. The drives build up with heat and just get way too hot.

2) 4 pin power supply. These are the most ungodly things I've ever had to deal with. Wall warts are hell, especially in a small PC shop (about the size of your living room, with 9 workstations running at once and a ton of shelving for parts for sale and whatnot.

Those nice 12v power jacks that are seemingly universal among most computer parts are wonderful, but these drives don't use them.

3) They just don't have Firewire. I'm not a Mac guy, I'm not even really a PC guy. I read a review from the original MacBook Pro, with the buyer saying he's "A computer guy" so we'll leave it at that. Firewire is just faster. I'm transferring 230 odd gigs of RAW scratch data from Final Cut Studio right now, and USB would be 10 hours, Firewire is doing it in 4. Even across the PC world, Firewire is used, and is much faster.

4) The board has a pinout for eSata on it, but there's only a USB connection. Sure, it allows for the breakdown of price ranges, but honestly, is that 3 or 4 cent part really worth charging 10 dollars more for that feature?

The enclosures work, and as an added bonus, they're all solid state capacitors inside, but they could be built to better fit and cool drives. It doesn't need a fan, and I'm glad it doesn't have one, but the loose fit is bothersome.

Other than that, it gets the job done, and I can plug it into any computer and know I'll have access to my data. If you want the cheaper, but identical version drive, Vantec USA makes drives that are just like it.

7/10 from me. It works, but I'm paying enough for a good enclosure, it should be able to do everything.

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