Kingwin AT100 Mobile Rack KF-101

A well made removable hard drive system for mobility or rapid drive changing. — Joe

SUMMARY: A well made removable hard drive system for mobility or rapid drive changing.

Rack

The good guys at Kingwin were nice enough to send us a sample of their Mobile Hard Drive Rack, model # KF-101. This is not a cheapo plastic rack you might see for $15 at a local computer show – this rack houses the drive in an aluminum case; the sleeve has aluminum drive rails – the only plastic parts are the front and back pieces. In addition, this rack supports ATA100 hard drives. By pressing on this button

Button

the top plate slides off the drive case.

Inside

Inside is the power plug and IDE cable. You slip in the hard drive, bolt it into place (although I think you don’t have to – it’s pretty snug when it’s closed) and insert it into the sleeve. The sleeve fits into a standard 5.25″ drive bay. Included are screws and two keys.

The key is necessary to activate the drive – the drive is only powered up when the rack is locked into place. This is a safety step which prevents a powered drive from being removed by mistake. Inside the rack is a small fan; from the bottom

Bottom

you can see that the fan exhausts air through a small duct towards the interior of the case. The grill on the front allows ambient air to enter the sleeve from the case front.

The back

Back

has the IDE and power plug (these racks also come in SCSI models as well) – nothing esoteric here. Bolt the sleeve in place, hook up the cables, mount the drive in the rack, insert it, lock and you’re off and running.

I tested an IBM 7200 rpm ATA100 drive using HD Tach 2.52, mounted in the sleeve and free of the sleeve, and found no performance difference. In addition, I stood on the rack to see how it would stand up – very sturdy!

CONCLUSION

I would think if you need a mobile rack, one of its requirements would be that it would have to stand up to some abuse. Now I’m not saying you can hammer nails with it, but this rack can stand some abuse. If you like to run multiple OSs on separate drives, this product, with two racks, makes it a snap.

Thanks again to Kingwin for sending this our way. You can purchase this product at Crazy PC.

Email Joe

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply