Thermaltake Muse eSATA External SATA II Enclosure

Accessories

Published: 4th April 2006 | Source: Thermaltake | Price: | Author: Matt Krei

Cables & Accessories

Included in the package you will find everything needed to get setup and running in a matter of 10-15 minutes. The first piece that you may notice is the PCI backplate with a pair of inputs on the front then leading to 3 cables on the back side. The left most input on the backplate is the SATA connector, and right next door is the power connector which also has a very small cable with a spot to plug in to your motherboards HDD LED connector and then pass-thru for your case HDD LED connector. This enclosures power is fed straight from your power supply with no support to be powered via external power adapter. This can be good and bad. On the plus side, there is no need for a clunky wall adapter which you can never find a spot for and streamlines the cabling a considerable amount. On the other side of things if you are running an HTPC or other small computer you may have used all of your 4-pin molex connectors, thus needing to hunt down a Y-splitter. Some super small mATX mini cases are coming with 200-250w psu's as well, depending on the hardware inside of that little box you may be a bit shy of the power required to operate this enclosure but this would be a very rare circumstance it seems.

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.

On the back of the enclosure is where you'll find the neatly lined up and clearly marked connectors. There's only two so it's not very hard to get hooked up and running with this enclosure. Both cables lock nicely in place and don't look as if you'll have a problem with them trying to wiggle out over time (a common problem with one of my current USB enclosures).