Kingwin 2.5″ Mobile Disk Enclosure

Very nice unit – Joe

SUMMARY: An attractive package for diminutive hard drive mobility.

The good guys at Kingwin were nice enough to send a sample of their 2.5″ Mobile Disk Enclosure (Model# KH-100), USB 2.0 format. This enables users to set up a notebook-size hard drive as a “shirt pocket” drive.

Included with the enclosure are

• Housing
• USB & PSII Cables
• Drivers
• Instruction Manual
• Mounting Screws
• Vinyl Carry Pouch

The drive enclosure is petite and light – it measures a scant 17 mm thick. Note that it only takes 9.5 mm drives – it will not take anything thicker (unless you don’t want to use the cover). The enclosure consists of an aluminum housing and plastic hard drive holder:

The PCB is pretty bare-bones as well:

There are only two connectors:

One for the USB cable and one for the PSII cable. The PSII cable may not be needed if there is enough power from the USB port to power the drive – I used this on an Epia M10000 and did not need the PSII cable.

Mounting the drive is a snap – insert the drive into the connector block and screw it to the plastic sleeve:

Simple.

When you power up the PC, it lights up:

The bright blue neon light stays on (depends on BIOS settings for USB port) as long as its plugged in, and the red LED powers on when the drive is on.

To give some idea of what this little package can deliver, I used SiSandra to bench its performance with a Toshiba 20 GB ATA66 drive (HDD2154¹):

As a comparison, I used an adapter and ran the same drive using the motherboard’s second IDE port, with the following results:

Son of a gun – no real difference between using the USB 2.0 or standard IDE port connection. Impressive!

The Kingwin 2.5″ Mobile Disk Enclosure is a neat package for a “shirt pocket” drive. I can see lots of uses for a small package such as this, and anyone who routinely uses large files and needs portability can make very good use of this product. One thing that would be icing on the cake would be a firewire port in addition to the USB port.

Thanks again to Kingwin for sending this our way.

¹20 GB capacity, 4200 rpm, 13 ms Average Seek Time, ATA-4 Interface, 66.7 MB/s Ultra DMA/66 Transfer Rate, 1,024KB Buffer

Email Joe