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Introduction

The idea of making data portable has been a problem since the dawn of the computer age. During my dad's college days, their idea of data portability was a shoebox full of punch cards. Decades later things improved a bit, there was the floppy disk. Throughout the years there have been gradual improvements - high density floppy disks, zip drives, and CDRs. Today the CD-R dominates the portable media format along with USB flash drives and even recordable DVDs are starting to catch on also. Two problems exist with all of the solutions listed above - speed and data capacity. CDs are relatively quick to write but the capacity is limited. DVDs have pretty good capacity but speed is fairly slow. None of these technologies compare to the hard drive however.

The main barrier to a portable hard drive was the lack of a ubiquitous high speed external connector. This however, has been alleviated in recent times with USB2 and Firewire. Firewire boasts a I/O rate of 400Mbps while USB2 has a claimed 480Mbps. A big advantage that writing files to disk is no different than copying a file between two locations on the hard drive. With optical media it is usually not this fast nor this transparent. Big companies including the likes of Maxtor are pushing their own brands of external hard drives at a substantial premium while the common desktop drive continues to plummet in price.

Today we take a look at a Thermaltake's Silver River 5.25" drive enclosure that accepts either hard drives or optical drives. A stand alone enclosure has some advantages - you, the end user chooses the optical drive and the hard drive you want to use with the enclosure and it can be upgraded on a whim and it is definitely cheaper than buying a specific external hard drive.