Kingwin Jet External Enclosure

Attractive ESATA enclosure with backup capabilities – Joe

SUMMARY: An attractive answer to external storage and painless file backups.

The good guys at Kingwin were nice enough to send a sample of their Jet External Enclosure (Model # JT-35EU-BK). This houses a SATA hard drive which can be connected to your PC either through a SATA or USB cable.

Features:

• 3.5″ E-SATA + USB combo black aluminum external enclosure
• Aluminum design with front blue LED power On/Off button
• Plug & play, hot-swapping capability and One Touch Backup
• USB 2.0 EHCI based; Genli, gen1m, gen2i and gen2m of Serial ATA II electrical specification 1.0
• Transfer rates – USB 2.0: 1.5/12/480 Mbps; SATA: 1.5/3 Gb/s
• 7 5/8″ / 194 mm Long x 4 1/2″ / 115 mm Wide x 1 5 / 8″40 mm High
• 80 mm Cooling fan
• Includes stand, 12 volt power adapter, eSATA and USB cable and software CD

The back shows the usual ports plus the “one-touch” file backup button:

The cover comes off very easily – the large knurled knobs make it easy to unscrew the back without a screwdriver; once opened, you see the PCB and the cooling fan (not very noisy but noticeable):

The bottom view:

The back PCB:

And the major components:

When I installed a SATA drive, I noticed that the fit for the SATA cable is very tight:

It’s tight (as the inset shows) but does not seem to be a problem. The drive installed…

And a view of the cable fit:

A side note: you have to use formatted SATA drive – an unformatted drive will not be recognized.

Included with Kingwin’s Jet is software to enable the “One-Touch” file backup function. This is a “lite” version of Fnet’s PCClone Ex – this software enables file backups, not total system backups. After installation, a PCClone icon is installed on the desktop and system tray – click on it, or hit the “one-touch” button on the enclosure, and this screen comes up:

Click on the “Quick Launch” icon and this comes up:

Hit the “Start” button and it proceeds to backup files:

Obviously how long it takes depends on how much you have – my wife’s laptop took about 20 minutes for 7.5 GB worth of files. It also generates a text file that lists some items not backed up, but not all. Clicking on the second menu icon brings up this:

The third menu icon brings up a somewhat confusing screen:

You figure out that the left side is your OC and the right side is the external drive. Finally there is a “Help” function:

Adequate enough to figure out what’s going on – the last two screens are “drag and drop”, so you can select whichever file you either want to backup or restore.

Kingwin’s Jet External Enclosure is an attractive answer to external storage and painless file backups, although the backup software is limited in scope.

Email Joe