Coolmax enclosure – Not so cool!

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In my last blog I described my experience with the 1.5TB Seagate FreeAgent Desk external drive that I bought from Costco.

Instead I ordered a Coolmax CD-391T-U2 enclosure from TigerDirect and a 1.5TB Western Digtial drive. Wednesday I received the enclosures and the drive and immediately put the drive in. It was a bit tricky to put this together and the USB cable that came with it was only about 14-16" long. I plugged it in and the first thing I noticed was how loud the fan was. It was disturbingly loud!

First thing was to partition and format the drive and I knew that would take a while so I set it to do that over night. The morning after it was still formatting and I realized something was not right, so I stopped the formatting process and reconnected the drive to another USB port with another cable in case it was a cable/port problem.

8 hours later it was finally done with the format process so yesterday afternoon I started a backup process. I immediately realized that something was not right. It was barely getting 1MB pr. second transfer rate to the new drive. After messing around with it I realized that the enclosure seems to be having an issue with the USB to SATA conversion OR that it is actually designed for USB 1.1 not USB 2.0! So I decided to not mess with this and I am returning those to Tiger Direct.

After hours of checking things out I decided on my next enclosure to test out, a Vantec NexStar 3 NST-360SU-BL enclosure that supports both USB 2.0 and eSATA which supports up to 3Gbps (Gigabits per second) transfer rate compared to 480Mbps (Megabits per second) for USB 2.0 and only 12Mbps for USB 1.1! I should have those sometime next week and will report my experience with those. The Vantec does not have a fan so it should be quiet. It does come with both USB and eSATA cables (unfortunately the machine I'm using this with doesn't have an eSATA port, but more on that later) and get's 4.7 stars out of 5 available in 94 reviews on TigerDirect. The price is (currently) the same as the CoolMax, or US$29.99.

Arnor Baldvinsson

2 thoughts on “Coolmax enclosure – Not so cool!”

  1. Ned Reiter

    I have 2 of the Vantec NexStar 3 enclosures that I use for my off site backups. The eSata port is really fast. Copying the monthly full backup files (nearly 300GB) takes about less than 2 hours. I can't imagine doing that over a USB connection. And the Vantec boxes are really quiet.

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