Rosewill RX81-MP-SC-BLK - An External Enclosure featuring eSATA, USB 2.0, and IEEE 1394.

A Storage Story, one man's quest for a fast, flexible, and feature packed sidekick on a budget.

Have you ever had one of those days where nothing goes right? Or does Murphy's Law seem to sentence you to some dreary luck sometimes? Yeah it happens to me more often than I care to admit... That is why I tend to error on the side of safety when it comes to my ones and zeros. Now of course I have always wanted tons of storage for my computers but until recently, I had to sacrifice size and speed for a "less is best" lie. This is when I considered hard drive performance and capacity into the equation.

If this type of drama is all too familiar to you then I have some interesting news for you. With all the advancements in the technology world, and the cutthroat competition that is out there, many of the PC items that once were only for those with deep pockets now fit the bill for those on a budget. I have more of the kind of currency that jingles than that crinkly stuff. Therefore, it is imperative when I go shopping that bang for the buck always comes first. This is especially true when looking at storage items. Currently a top performing 750GB, 7200 RPM Drive, with a 5-year warranty will run you around $90! Now I do not know about you, but to me, that is truly amazing. Even top performing 1TB drives are available under $120 now and certainly less expensive on sale.

External storage options have also shrunk in price but grown in size over the years. They have a handiness factor that internal drives just don't have for those on the go like me. I am like a lot of you out there with more than one PC and usually have one with me wherever I go. I still frequent local LAN Parties regularly and a huge LAN event in Kentucky each year, as I find the social aspect can't be beat. Teamspeak or Ventrilo over broadband just can't compare to actually being in the same room with your friends. Moreover, even cheap pizza tastes better when you can talk trash directly to your buds after some intense death matching or PvP (any Left 4 Dead Fans out there?) contests!

I recently picked up a RX81-MP-SC-BLK external enclosure from Rosewill that features eSATA, FireWire 400 and 800, along with USB 1.1 and 2.0 support. This enclosure supports all flavors of Windows (98 Second Edition and higher) and has support for Mac (OS 8.6 and above) plus Linux (kernel 2.4 or higher)! Those connectivity options should be good enough for just about anyone. I also noticed this unit supports up to 1TB or larger 3.5” SATA drives. The one I received was black but they also have it in silver if black is to boring for you. I personally put a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB 7200 RPM SATA drive that I picked up for next to nothing on sale that offers a great performance for the price.

This unit retails for $70 now but I have seen it as low as $60 on sale, which is a great price for such a feature packed unit that once sold for $149. I have found this item to be surprisingly sturdy and very solid. It needs to be with my constant travels. Since this is my third external unit I can say from experience that not all units are made this well. I found that installing the hard drive could be difficult at times. If I was planning on swapping drives a lot, I would probably make another choice but I needed something that could take abuse.

As such, I have found this unit to be perfect for my LAN outings. I am also the server admin at the quarterly LAN Party in my neighborhood, so this unit is great for all those slackers who arrive without the latest updates and patches for their games or OS. I have also found it especially handy for temporary backups when repairing ailing PC’s, something all of us have experienced at one time or another. Better safe than sorry right?

I ran the typical hard drive tests like PCMark Vantage and noticed performance is within a percent of my internal drives when using the eSATA feature. Rosewill utilizes the Oxford OX924DSB bridge chip in this unit. All other tests show no real differences in performance, nor should they actually. To be honest, I only use USB or Firewire when I have no other choice since they perform slower but I still need those options.

The unit is not sound dampened so a noisy drive will still sound noisy, just muted a little. My Seagate drive acoustic levels were about 2 dB(A) higher in this enclosure at load compared to the same drive in my Nine Hundred case. The RX81 is all aluminum and utilizes passive cooling techniques to keep temperatures under control. Idle temps were about 1C higher and load temps about 4C higher compared to the drive being installed in the case. An increase yes, but nothing out of the ordinary for a passively cooled enclosure.

The Rosewill RX81-MP-SC looks sharp sitting next to my Antec Nine Hundred Series Tower. It is nice to buy something new at a reasonable price that just has that "old school" solid feel to it. I plan to purchase another one to attach to my HD DVR since 30 hours of record time no longer cuts it. Maybe it's time to move up to a 750GB or 1TB drive and improve that bang for the buck fetish I have! In the meantime, we highly recommend this unit from Rosewill.