Review: Rosewill RX81-MP Hard Drive Enclosure
02.16.08 - 10:04am
Even extreme hardware benchers need effective data storage and Rosewill has managed to pull a winner with the RX81-MP. In a market saturated with products it is very hard to standout but this particular enclosure does well by adopting what I’d consider to be a classy exterior with a performance interior. The enclosure itself is formed from heavy gauge aluminum with an eye catching vented grill to help cool the enclosed hard drive. Let’s see how this product stands up to the test.
Packaging
When the RX81-MP arrived I was rather surprised at the sheer size of the package. I’ve had enclosures delivered to me before and they typically had the enclosure simply wrapped in a thin cardboard box. The RX81-MP came in a very stylish heavy cardboard box with the enclosure itself nestled inside the box with stiff styrofoam padding to protect the enclosure. Considering how the UPS box looked like it traveled through a war zone, I was worried about how the enclosure held up but all was well. Besides the well cushioned enclosure, the box included a brief installation manual, an AC/DC powersupply, and eSATA and USB 2.0 cables.
Initial Impression
Upon unboxing the enclosure I was first impressed by it’s sheer weight. With electronics in general, weight is a good indicator of quality and this holds true with the RX81-MP. The thick, matte black, aluminum chassis with it’s vented grill rests on a minimalistic stand that features padded footrests to reduce vibrations. Given that this would be housing a high-speed 7200RPM hard drive, all the additional weight was welcome as when a hard-drive is randomly seeking it can create a bit of vibration and some lighter enclosures in the past have vibrated against the desk even with padding. Located in the front of the enclosure is a two-color LED that will glow blue when the drive is powered and flash red when there is disk activity. The LED itself isn’t bright enough to be annoying thankfully and it can be rather soothing to zone out while watching the LED blink away furiously while writing to the disk. All the included cables were of sufficient length such that you can place the enclosure by your PC or remotely locate it on your desk.
Installation
The RX81-MP makes a healthy use of screws to secure everything in place. To install a hard drive into the chassis you must first remove four beveled screws from the base, slide out the center of the enclosure, and remove four additional screws to gain access to the actual drive chassis. The chassis itself also features thoughtful rubber tabs to prevent it from vibrating against the casing, a good idea otherwise the drive would make an utter racket. Inside the chassis sits the PCB with the J-Micron 20336 Bridge Controller with the SATA connector and SATA power cable. When installing the hard-drive I would highly suggest disconnecting the included SATA cable from the PCB and connecting it to the drive, securing the drive, then bending the cable to snuggly fit into the receptacle on the PCB. I mention this as I nearly snapped off the SATA connector while installed my drive, mostly due to user error/brute force. Considering how this is a component that should rarely be touched, this is a non-issue in regards to quality.
Testing
I decided to perform two separate tests on this hard drive to fully gauge it’s performance. Since I am a hardware guru, it makes perfect sense that the first test would revolve around hardware benchmarking. The second set of tests though were comprised of usability tests on both my desktop testbed and my personal laptop. With the desktop I performed through-put tests while measuring temperatures and noting sound and vibration details. The laptop tests were conducted over a two day period in which I used to enclosure to store media from my laptop and then disassembling and reassembling the enclosure to test for ease of use and mobility.
Testbeds
- Mobile: 1st Generation Apple Macbook, OS X Tiger
- Desktop: QX9650, Gigabyte X38-DS4/MSI P35 Neo2-FR, 2×1GB DDR2, Windows XP
- Harddrive: Seagate 500GB 7200.10 with 16MB Cache
Results: Benchmarks
To start things off I had an immense difficulty testing eSATA as my X38 motherboard did not support “plug and play” SATA drives and I believe my MSI P35 Neo2-FR is slowly dying a painful death as the eSATA ports were acting very erratically. USB performance though was nearly identical across both platforms which was comforting and I’ve been told by other users that eSATA works perfectly so this seems to be simply a fluke on my part. To provide a comparison I tested the hard drive with a standard SATA cable hooked directly into the ICH9R southbridge and then I tested the drive while installed in the enclosure. Since USB 2.0 is limited to 60 megabyte/second I knew there would be a modest drop in performance. Via SATA the hard drive pushed an average of 65.4 megabyte/second with a 12.9ms random access time and a 219 megabyte/second burst. Through USB though the hard drive maintained a solid 30.7 megabyte/second with a 13.7ms random access time and a 36.5 megabyte/second burst. These numbers indicate that the J-Micron 20336 SATA controller is a harsh bottleneck on throughput which could make some file transfers a bit longer than necessary.
HD Tach results, SATA AVG: 65.4MB/s, USB AVG: 30.7MB/s
HD Tune results, SATA AVG: 63.1MB/s, USB AVG: 28.9MB/s
Results: Daily Use and Thermals
The funny issue with synthetic benchmarks is that you rarely notice how drastic of a performance difference in daily performance that they indicate. For daily activities like playing music and video I had no idea that I was only operating at roughly 50% of the potential speed. The drive was immediately recognized within both XP and OS X and formating with NTFS, FAT32, and Mac OS Extended was flawless. The only time I noticed the slower throughput was on my desktop while transferring over a couple of gigabytes of test data, I’m used to snappy RAID1 and RAID0 setups so I was wondering why it seemed to be taking so long. Disassembling and reassembling the RX81-MP was a breeze and while I wouldn’t take it with me to the library and such, if it was necessary it wouldn’t be an issue. Power consumption sat at a steady 12 watts when on and 1 watt when off. Since the hard drive is always spinning when the enclosure is powered on, I would suggest turning the unit off if you aren’t at your desk for an extended period of time. The drive itself peaked at 37 Celsius when being thrashed with file transfers with a 18 Celsius ambient temperature while the casing itself operated around 24 Celsius.
Conclusion
At the end of the day the RX81-MP is a great option if you are in the market for a stylish and well constructed hard drive enclosure. Given that there are literally thousands of enclosures available it may be very hard for this one to get noticed but it is definitely worth the price tag. Typical performance was satisfactory, thermals were well within acceptable levels, vibrations were effectively snuffed, and the only strike against the enclosure was the actual throughput. The enclosure itself is aesthetically pleasing and well constructed and I am certain the drive enclosed would fail before the case itself was damaged if dropped. If you are in the market for a stylish but unobtrusive enclosure then I’d highly suggest checking out the RX81-MP.
Pros
- Looks Great
- Well Constructed and Packaged
- Great Thermal and Acoustic Performance
Cons
- Slow SATA Controller
Final Score: 8/10
This enclosure is currently available for purchase from Newegg.com. A special thank you goes out to Cynthia Liu and Rosewill for their fantastic cooperation.
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