Zebra Drive Enclosure
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The jumper is to tell the converter whether you’re using a master or slave drive and the power connector has both a floppy drive to a female four pin Molex and another male four pin Molex on it. I’m not quite sure why the power adapter has both a male and female four pin Molex on it but it may be they just used a readily available power adapter instead of designing a new one.
The SATA-IDE converter is very easy to install and makes for a very versatile and flexible set up to be able to use both IDE and SATA drives in the enclosure. You can also purchase the USIB to eSATA cable; the USIB to USB comes with the regular enclosure and the eSATA cable is available separately.
You can purchase Zebra drives with the USIB connection on the back or the eSATA connection depending on your particular needs. This allows for a very versatile enclosure with plenty of options for all those spare drives you have and a wide variety of ways to connect them to your system.
The fan on the drive enclosure is really a nice added touch especially for those cheaper and hot running hard drives but some of the optical drives also run hot. Adding a small cooling fan that at least gives some cooling adds to the features of this nice enclosure.
The enclosure also has a small on off switch but this is a rather small one that can be a bit hard to use if you’re reaching behind it without looking. It would have been nicer to have a slightly larger switch for a bit easier time turning the drive on and off.
The power adapter is a separate power cable and unit so you can remove the power cord from the enclosure but it is not a regular connection type and I have not seen this type of power adapter before. It has two voltages for outputs, 5 volt and 12 volt both at 2 amps so is different in that respect than most other adapters I have seen except for the regular adapters for notebook computers.
The drive enclosure is hot swappable as most drive enclosures are and has a nice multicolored light that changes from an orange color to green when it is connected and ready to use with your system. The orange light will be on when your computer is setting up the device and when your computer has it all ready it will change to green so you have a simple and easy way to tell if it is properly connected and working.
The drive enclosure worked fine but I am really having fun with it and my entertainment center, I am using the drive enclosures and my PS3 for a great entertainment system. I have copied several movies onto the hard drive and converted them into MPEG4 for use on the PS3 and can watch the movies on my PlayStation 3 and my PSP using remote play.
Once I have my PS3 and PSP set up in remote play I can get my carcass off the couch and bike my way to health while watching some great movies. I have this Schwinn Recumbent bike I purchased, that’s how much I liked that review product, and get my exercise with that in the winter. I can sit on the recumbent bike and get my exercise as I’m watching the movies on the PSP and listening on my earphones without bugging anyone else at home as they do their thing.
I really enjoy tinkering and found the drive enclosures had plenty of versatility and were easy to use. I like the fact you can use just about any IDE or SATA drive and output to either USB or eSATA from the same enclosure with the addition of a simple extra cable or converter.
I highly recommend the Zebra drive enclosure for its versatility and convenience as well as just a really good drive enclosure.