| Cooler Master X Craft 250 and 350 Hard Drive Enclosures
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Testing:
To test the speed of each drive I ran a HDTach RW Quick Bench with both Cooler Master X Craft enclosures connected via USB 2.0. As you can see the X Craft 350 was slightly faster at accessing and raw speed probably because the Seagate drive in the X Craft 350 is 7200RPM opposed to the 5400RPM Seagate in the X Craft 250.
For testing the eSATA interface on the X Craft 350 I hooked up the eSATA cable to the front of my Enermax Charka case. This eSATA port is connected to a SATA 3 Gbps header on my motherboard so we should see some fast burst speeds. I was shocked to see a burst speed of 137 MB/s with the X Craft 350. I removed the hard drive and connected it directly to my motherboard and got a much more acceptable result; 261 MB/s burst speed. Apparently the enclosure physically supports SATA 3 Gbps drives but not at full speed.
The USB 2.0 hub in the X Craft 350 worked like any other USB port does. Plug in a USB flash drive and it's accessible like it would normally be.
The P&G Backup software included with the X Craft 350 looks pretty decent. After the installation from the included CD and a reboot, I ran the IniBackup software by pushing the one key backup button. The initial setup is pretty straightforward; choose "New" under the "Edit Task" area to bring up a new backup task. Pick a source directory and destination directory and the default options below should be good enough for a normal backup.
 
Once the backup task is setup, click on "Execute" on the main screen and the job starts. When it is running through the backup task you can see which file is currently being backed up and a progress bar. One thing I also noticed that came with the P&G Backup software was an Update Manager for keeping the program up to date as well as the Update Manager utility. Personally I do not like software that installs other software that runs on startup without notifying me. Also there is no profile in Add/Remove Programs to uninstall the Update Manager manually. I recognize the software from new Dell computers I have seen with the other bloatware that is preloaded.
 
The backup software bundled with the X Craft 250 was next on my list to test. From the CD I installed the program and rebooted Windows as instructed. Once the system was back up I pushed the one touch backup button on the enclosure. It seemed to me like the program tried to run but failed. So I tried running the backup program from the Start - All Programs menu and the same thing happened. There was nothing in the Event log about the failure and I tried removing and adding the software again but no luck. I couldn't test the backup software for the X Craft 250 because it simply would not start!
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