 Thermaltake eSATA/USB combo fails on the combo part. Strengths: Easy to hook up, find drive (Windows XP 32b), cool temperature with a 7200rpm 320 Seagate SATA drive. Power supply is not a wall wart. Includes magnetized screwdriver. Also does old ATA drives.
Weaknesses: eSATA interface doesn't work with my onboard eSATA Shuttle XPC and a modern SATA HDD. Supposed to use a switch to toggle between USB and eSATA.
Summary: I had really hoped to use this enclosure as a backup drive at full eSATA 3.0 speed, but that won't work for me. It is either broken, outright incompatible with my Shuttle XPC 3100 and the Seagate 320gb, or I am a complete moron (possible).
With the device toggled to USB and plugged into USB, it's ok. Usb 2.0 interface shows up, mounts, and acts as expected. Transfers work ok, without error.
With the device toggled to eSATA and plugged into eSATA, it's downright unusable. eSATA interface shows up and mounts, but transfers consistently have bad timings. Copies appear to take forever, and there are messages every 2 seconds in the Windows System Event Log.
Small copies of files under 300k are tolerable, but who is that these days? Maybe you own 320gb of fonts. I don't.
I tried upgrading my Shuttle 3100's BIOS, jumpering the speed down to 1.5gb on the Seagate 320, and switching the BIOS SATA modes, but no improvement.
Operations like scanning the 60% full disc for errors on Windows startup never complete in any configuration, and copies of my backup data are brutally slow due to the errors.
I haven't tried the next-most obvious steps of using the device set to USB mode but plugged into eSATA.
The brick of the power supply sits mid-cable, so it won't hog up your power strip. There's a windows 98 driver disc. A magnetized screw driver included, which is classy.
Overall, nice try for a USB drive, but total failure as an eSATA enclosure. 5 thumbs down.
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