| Mapower MAP-H31SS 3.5" External Enclosure
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The Enclosure (continued):
This is where the confusion set in. There are two connectors coming off the board that appear to be able to plug into the hard drive, but there is no mention of the purpose or any diagram as to where they should go. In the picture on the left are the connectors coming from the enclosure. On the right is a picture of the connectors on the hard drive.
 
When the drive is mounted in the enclosure, the connectors would hit one of the brass standoffs. The picture below shows how the connectors would interfere.
So, these connectors were not used in this installation. One of the possibilities that crossed my mind was a hard drive activity signal from the hard drive to the front LED. But even if that were the case, they cannot be plugged in due to the brass standoff. To mention it one more time, the 20mm fan that this enclosure is made for is not included, it is mentioned on the Mapower website as being an option and to contact Mapower to order. A 20mm fan is a cheap addition and one most certainly should have been included. The last steps involve plugging in power and the included SATA cable.
 
One comment about the SATA cable is that this is one of the nicest ones I have ever come across. It is thick, flexible, and the ends have metal shields on them. This cord does seem like its made for external service and not the standard protected internal duties.
Once the hard drive is mounted to the chassis, the whole thing is slid back into the aluminum extrusion and the two screws are replaced.
Testing:
I had to open up my case to plug the SATA cable into a spare SATA port on my motherboard due to the fact that I don't (yet) own an eSATA external connector. Once power was hooked up and turned on, Windows XP instantly recognized the Seagate 200GB hard drive and everything appeared just like the drive was mounted internally.
SATA is capable of up to 1.5 Gbps or 3 Gbps, and so is this enclosure. There is no special circuitry between the SATA hard drive and the controller on your computer. Seeing how SATA is hot swappable, and the cable length can be up to 1 meter, there is no need to have any kind of conversion. Full SATA speeds are available from this enclosure. Due to this fact, any comparisons between this hard drive mounted internally or externally in the Mapower enclosure will be identical and therefore useless. But I had to make sure, so I tested the hard drive with HDTach both internally and externally. With just a small amount of difference due to normal variances, you can see in the HDTach screenshot below that indeed, there is no speed hit when using this SATA enclosure.
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