Installation:

For this review a Seagate Barracuda 80GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0 hard drive was used for testing. Installing the drive was relatively simple with no instructions necessary. After removing the two screws from the back of the enclosure, the back slid off from the rest of the enclosure. Attaching the drive to the internal circuit board was simple. Just slide the drive into the SATA connectors and fasten the hard drive to the plastic platform with the screws enclosed with the enclosure.


Next, slide the drive back into the case and screw the back into the case. It was a little difficult to slide the drive back into the case once attached to the circuit board, but this was good because it meant the drive sat securely inside the enclosure.


The case has a blue LED that blinks to indicate drive activity, and the whole thing fits well into the foot-stand to secure it in an upright position.

Testing:

Using the drive Mapower USB 2.0 + eSATA 3.5" External Enclosure was also quite easy. Using Windows XP I was able to plug it in (via USB 2.0) and it was picked up as removable storage right away. The drive was also not very noisy while inside the MAP-AL31CS, just a faint low whistle of spinning inside the hard drive.

To test the speed of the drive I used the Quick Bench of HD Tach RW version 3.0.1.0. The graph below shows the drive's performance while connected directly to a SATA header, while connected via USB 2.0 in the Mapower enclosure, and while connected via USB 2.0 using a Newertech Universal Drive Adapter.


The lack of the necessary eSATA cables prevented testing via that interface, but the USB results show that the Mapower enclosure performs up to par.