Installation and Operation:
Installing a hard drive is a fairly straight forward process, and with the included instructions should be easily accomplished by even the most mechanically challenged individuals. The rear end cap is removed by taking the two screws out and slowly sliding it and the tray out of the enclosure's body.
The below left image shows the enclosure, drive tray, and hard drive in preparation for installation. The SATA and power connections are fairly short and it does take a little bit of effort to get everything oriented properly, but nothing exceptionally difficult. Once the connections are plugged in, line up the drive with the mounting holes and secure it in place with the provided screws. The below right image shows the hard drive mounted in the tray. The tray is then slid back into the enclosure's body. This is where I experienced my first issue with the Elite Series enclosure. There is an LED wire that runs from the front end cap through the enclosure's body that needs to be plugged into the two pin header on the drive tray's controller board. The connection is not labeled or keyed and provides no orientation as to how it should be connected. There are only two possibilities, but I guessed wrong the first time and had to slide the tray back out and turn the plug the other way to get the blue LED on the front panel to light up.
The image below gives you a good look at the enclosure's aluminum body and the LED wire.
The Software:
There are many things I can say about the "One Touch Back Up" software (PC Clonex Lite, Version 1.84.16), but I will just settle for calling it a work in progress. I installed the software on my Windows XP SP2 test system and immediately noticed some issues. The most significant of these was the fact that you could select the My Documents folder for back up, run the software which would then tell you the back up was complete, but further investigation showed the My Documents folder was nowhere to be found on the external drive. Also notable was that you could only use the back up software while the drive was connected via USB 2.0, it wouldn't recognize the e-SATA connected drive. I then checked Kingwin's site and noticed they offered an older version of the software for download (PC Clonex Lite, Version 1.83.07). After uninstalling the version provided with the enclosure and installing the older version, I had much better results. The software would back up all selected directories and even back up to an e-SATA connected hard drive. The one touch back up button still doesn't operate while connected via e-SATA, but it's not difficult to start the back up from within the program.
