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Vizo Luxon 3.5Inch External IDE/SATA HDD Enclosure Review

Storage/Other by geoffrey @ 2009-10-25

You can find them in nearly every variation you want: black, white, pink, robust, ultra-light, slick, mat, ... but deciding which one suits you best, performance and style wise often is not an easy job certainly if you are trying to integrate these into your living room environment. HDD Enclosures, that is what I am talking about and today we have a look at an 3,5inch IDE/SATA enclosure offering by Vizo.

Specs, features and test results

Specifications

Case Material : Aluminum

Host Interface: 480Mbps USB 2.0 (USB 1.1 Compatible)
3.0Gbps High Speed external Serial-ATA ( eSATA )

HDD Type : 3.5 " IDE / SATA Hard Drive ( Maximum capacity up to 750G / 1.5TB )

Power Supply : AC/DC POWER Adapter
( AC input: 100~ 240Vac , DC output: +5V/+12V)

Indicators : Blue for POWER on / Purple for file access

Available colors : Black, Blue

Model No. : LXE-350-BK, LXE-350-BL

Weight : 400 g (without HDD)

Dimensions : 210(L) x 125 (W) x 34 (H) mm

Features

Compatible with 3.5" IDE/SATA Hard Drive

Support 480Mbps High Speed USB 2.0

Support 3.0Gbps High Speed external Serial-ATA ( eSATA )

4 functions in it :
USB to IDE HDD, eSATA to IDE HDD
USB to SATA HDD, eSATA to SATA HDD

Sleek and elegant design

Aluminum housing for excellent heat dissipation

Side vents improve convection for better system cooling

Support plug and play & hot swappable
* Must be attached to SATA 3.0G/eSATA 3.0G hot swappable compliant host to enable hot swappable function

Test setup

Intel E8600 CPU

2 x 2GB DDR2 RAM PC6400 CAS4

MSI P35 Platinum mainboard

NVIDIA 8800GT graphics card

Samsung HD750LJ SATA hard disc

Corsair X128 SATA solid state drive

Vizo Luxon Advanced

Antec MX-1

Test results: USB

My first test results were obtained on an Intel E6600 CPU with 2GB DDR RAM and NVIDIA 650i chipset. Hard Disk used was a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 (40GB, ATA/133) which may been hanging around here for nearly a decade. The maximum speed I could obtain with this PATA drive was roughly 50MB/s using the eSATA interface, though with the age of the drive in mind I quickly changed over to the 750gig backup drive I have around: a Samsung HD760LJ mechanical drive with SATA interface. To be sure all features would be supported I also decided to move over to the newer P35 chipset from Intel.

LEFT: Antec MX-1 & Samsung HD750LJ || RIGHT: Vizo Luxon Advanced & Samsung HD750LJ
(click to enlarge)

We compared the Luxon Advanced 3,5" HDD enclosure with the MX-1 from Antec which we reviewed earlier. Using the SATA interface of the hard drive we first hooked up the enclosure to the pc by using an USB connection. As you can see above it is not hard to understand that USB 2.0, although very handy for HID devices, does not offer enough bandwidth to show the full potential of the hard drive. It's plug-and-plug feature supported by nearly every pc makes it ultra-compatible though for fast read/write actions, lower latency and off course faster access and copying a faster interface is required. Let's move on to external SATA, or eSATA as most will call it...

Test results: eSATA

LEFT: Antec MX-1 & Samsung HD750LJ || RIGHT: Vizo Luxon Advanced & Samsung HD750LJ
(click to enlarge)

Motherboard of choice features a whole bunch of internal SATA ports and two eSATA ports on the back, they're all SATA 2 (3Gbit/s) ports which have 300MB/s data throughput instead of 150MB/s. Mechanical drives will hardly saturate the SATA interface, but with SSD's slowly taking market share SATA 600 will surely be something of good use.

The Samsung drive surely isn't the newest one on the market though using the eSATA interface we could increase read and write speeds nearly 3 times. We know that would make a difference to you, right? Performance wise we see no real difference between both tested HDD enclosures, no loser here, so we wanted to further push the envelope and swap in the Corsair X128 SSD for the Samsung drive:

Madshrimps (c)

Antec MX-1 & Corsair X128

With the X128 drive we could double the performance compared to the Samsung drive and with read speeds of over 270MB/s we're closing in on the interface maximum throughput. Unfortunately we could not get the SSD working together with the Vizo Luxon Advanced, though Vizo has based their enclosure upon the JM20336 controller which features SATA2 3.0G support so we expect likewise result, if the hard drive is supported that is...

Conclusive thoughts

Vizo Technology is not well know in European regions, though they've been around in Taiwan for nearly two decade with a constantly growing product range. Today we had a view at their Luxon Advanced series external HDD enclosures, and in particular the LXE-350 model. First sight looks of this product are more then okay and with their simple yet smooth design they can easily be used in office and home environments without breaking the room atmosphere. Its lightweight makes it easy to carry and installation goes very easy and fast, just don't forget to place the jumper when using SATA disks. The JM20336 controller inside supports both PATA and SATA interfaces and the computer connection can be made by either using USB 2.0 or eSATA 3.0G, in total 4 different ways of configuring your external storage system.

Performance wise we see the Luxon Advanced stick up with competing products, only downside we found is that we could not get our Corsair X128 SSD working inside the LXE-350. Vizo themselves did yet test solid state drives in combo with the LXE-350, but since the housing does not support 2,5" devices it would not really matter either since most SSD's or made in the smaller form factor. With the future in mind it would be cool if we could also see 2,5" disks being supported, it's no biggie to add anyway.

Madshrimps (c)

Some conclusive keywords:
+ Lightweight
+ Easy to install
+ Supports PATA & SATA
+ USB2.0 & eSATA 3.0G

- No SSD support?
- 3,5" drives only

Hope you liked the reading, until soon!

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