Thermaltake's packaging is quite straightforward and not overly flashy.  On the front of the box you'll find a good picture of the enclosure along with a detailed list of specifications and included accessories inside the box.  Upon turning the box over you'll find small pictures of the enclosure from all angles which is quite nice if you're shopping around and trying to find an enclosure that's aesthetically pleasing.  This allows you to see what it looks like without cracking open the box and taking a peek.

One of the first things you may or may not notice when looking at the PCI bracket is that the SATA cable used is only a standard SATA 150 style cable.  I thought this was supposed to be a SATAII compliant enclosure?  We'll have at look at the performance on the following pages but I just wanted to point this out while we have the picture in front of us for inspection.  The interconnect cable on the other hand - the cable that connects the enclosure to the PCI bracket - looks to be a much more beefy cable which would imply that it's more than likely a true SATAII compliant cable.  Both the SATA interconnect cable and the DC power cable are fairly lengthy which makes it easy to find a good place to put your enclosure.  I've run in to problems on other enclosures with the cables being far to short and greatly limiting the area in which I can comfortably place the unit.

Installing your chosen hard drive in the enclosure couldn't be an easier process. The enclosure itself is a screwless design with an easy-open lever on the side that allows you to swing open the case.  Inside you'll find your two small cables for your data and power headers on the hard drive.  Simply plug these in and set your hard drive in the enclosure over the 4 pins in the base of the case which will slip in to the hard drives underside mounting holes.  There's a thick rubbery-type pad on the top of the enclosure that sandwiches the hard drive in place very well when you close up the case, after a big of gentle shaking I couldn't hear anything moving inside.  This makes the enclosure a great candidate for mobility as your HD won't be banging around inside while you're traveling.

Just as a quick note, you can also see in the above picture that Thermaltake has yet again used a SATA150 inside of the enclosure to connect the hard drive to the PCB.  This could prove to be detrimental to the boasted performance ratings from Thermaltake.

Once you've installed your hard drive the only thing left to do is connect the two external cables provided to you in the kit, flip the power switch, and boot up your computer.  Voila!  Instant SATA hard drive space.  It took me a total of two reboots before it was completely setup and ready for use in Windows Server 2003.

Now let's see how this enclosure stacks up to the competition!

On this graph, the red line & bar indicate the USB enclosure and the blue line & bar represent the Thermaltake Muse eSATA enclosure.  As you can see there is absolutely no competition between the two, the SATA enclosure completely dominates in every catagory.  The eSATA enclosure shows an increase of speed over the USB enclosure in random access time, average read speed, sequential read speed, and burst speed.  You may however notice that the burst speed, average read, and sequential read speed aren't that of what a true SATAII drive should produce.  Going back to earlier in the review where I had noted the lack of true SATAII cabling both on the PCI bracket and inside of the enclosure itself, this is where the problem lies.  If Thermaltake were to revamp the entire system using SATAII cables throughout we would more than likely be able to see a massive hike in performance.

These results are nothing to scoff at however.  The performance of this enclosure is unrivaled by any USB enclosure and is very economical as the price of SATA/SATAII drives are falling rapidly and can be found cheaper than IDE drives in some cases.

Performance results continued on next page...

The RAID 0 setup shows a healthy increase in performance over the eSATA setup. This is a bit dissapointing considering the fact that this enclosure is supposed to be fully SATAII compatible when in reality is not. The RAID setup beats out the eSATA setup in every catagory just as the eSATA enclosure had done to the USB 2.0 enclosure. This is where it becomes apparent that Thermaltake should rewire and re-release the unit with true support for SATAII. Until that time it will never fully live up to its expectations as a SATAII compliant enclosure.

Now may also be a good time to comment on the enclosures analog data transfer gauge. The gauge on my enclosure barely works. The highest the meter will ever get is 2 out of 9 and just kind of bounces quickly between 0 and 2 most of the time. The gauge serves no real purpose but the idea behind it is kind of cool. The gauge also does not differentiate from what hard drive is being used when the needle is bouncing around due to the fact that it uses the motherboards HDD LED connector. Whenever any of your systems main drives are being accessed, the needle will move on the external enclosure. It's a pretty flawed design to be completely honest. If Thermaltake were to add a higher voltage line to the meter, along with program the internal board to emit the data transfer statistics of only the enclsosures hard drive they would be hitting a home-run. It still wouldn't serve any great purpose but at least it would work and look good doing it.