Techaddicts.net - Silverstone MS04 External Hard Drive Enclosure Review

Review by: Daniel

Date: March 5th, 2007

Provided by: Silverstone

External Hard Drive enclosures allows internal hard drives to be portable. This is extremely convenient when a user wants to make files portable. They also allow large capacity hard drives to be installed within them, for maximum portable storage potential. Today, we look at the MS04 External 3.5" Hard Drive Enclosure from Silverstone. Silverstone is famous for creating stylish cases. This is also apparent in their external HDD drive enclosures. The MS04 supports IDE hard drives only, so newer SATA drives will not work with it.

This model comes in either Silver or Black. We will be looking at the Silver version.

Upon opening the box, you will find the manual, screws and foam cushions for installation, a USB 2.0 Cable, Firewire IEEE1394 Cable, AC Power brick, and a color matched stand to hold the hard drive enclosure. The cables seem a bit short, but are useful if you have front connections on your computer.

The enclosure we are looking at features a polished silver color. The entire unit is made out of aluminum. You can see that there are a few ventilation slots on the front and back of it, which is good for cooling down faster spinning HDD's.

The front of the enclosure features two LED's. The blue one indicates power, the red indicates hard drive activity. A small mesh grill is also on the front and behind it is a very small 30mm fan. The two screws on the front must be removed in order to install/remove the Hard

On the rear, there is a power switch, power input, USB 2.0 input, one IEEE 1394 input, and one IEEE 1394 output. The two IEEE 1394 ports allow daisy chaining of additional enclosures or other IEEE 1394 devices.

Inside, there is a simple rack to install the hard drive in, the small 30mm fan is on the left of the picture. On the right of the picture, there is the IDE connector and a Molex power cable.

Installing the Hard Drive is very simple, just drop it in, attach the power and IDE cables, line up the screw holes and fasten the included screws. The aluminum casing can now be put back on.

The aluminum enclosure can either be flat on its side, or put into the stand. The stand is plastic and able to hold the drive up securely.

When powered on, the Blue LED light indicates that power has been applied to the hard drive. The Red LED is for indicating Hard Drive activity. There is not too much sound from the small 30mm fan. When the drive is powered up, lots of sound leaks through the casing through the sides, where the slots are. Most enclosures do not have slots on the side, so they are often quieter.

Test Hard Drive: Maxtor D740X-6L 7200RPM ATA/133 60GB Hard Drive with 2MB Cache.

The Silverstone Enclosure gets a 29MB/s Drive Index Rating from SiSoft Sandra, using USB 2.0. It is almost on par with the Maxtor OneTouch reference drive.

Using FireWire IEEE 1394, the Silverstone Enclosure gets much faster results. Sisoft Sandra reports a result of a 37MB/s Drive Index. It beats out the reference drive, too, although the reference drive is USB 2.0.

Overall, Silverstone's Hard Drive enclosure offers a good value for anyone that is seeking a stylish enclosure to install their internal hard drives in. It also goes along great with a silver colored Silverstone computer case. Performance is up to par with other USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394 hard drives enclosures. This enclosure is a little more expensive than competing brands, but most do not offer an all aluminum design.