Kingwin KH-350SEU Hard Drive Enclosure

Posted 05/24/2007 at 2:57pm | by David Murphy

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Do you find yourself curious about the differences between a rave and a concert? Strangely so, Kingwin’s KH-350SEU external hard drive enclosure provides the perfect answer.

If you just want fancy lights alongside an experience that you probably won’t remember in the morning, grab your glowst… er… this enclosure, because that’s pretty much all the KH-350SEU has to separate it from everything else on the marketplace—lights.

Don’t get us wrong, these lights are quite good at what they do—illuminate stuff. And functionally, they serve a legitimate purpose. The bright blue “bubble light” on one side of the enclosure stays on whenever the power’s on. It’s pretty. Literally on the flip side, a similar orange light flickers on and off to the tune of the enclosed hard drive’s activity. It also is pretty.

And that’s about it. We’re serious. The USB/eSATA enclosure comes with nothing of any greater significance than those two lights—which are excellently done, we’ll again note. Using eSATA, there’s no additional speeding up or slowing down of the access rates between the enclosed drive and your computer (naturally, there’s a performance hit for using the USB mode). The enclosure lacks a fan to keep your drive cool, and there’s no front-panel display of any sort. Nothing. If the hard drive you provide is a piece of ham, then the KH-350SEU is the plain white bread that covers it.

Installation is as easy as taking a hard drive, attaching a little SATA connector, and sticking the drive into the enclosure. You also tighten four screws, which for the lack of anything else to write about, was a thrilling and enriching experience. The enclosure feels quite sturdy to the touch. But seeing as we like our drives in one piece, we’re not quite willing to test the construction materials. We’re nevertheless confident that the hard drive would break before the enclosure did.

In all seriousness, the KH-350SEU does look pretty neat. And it sure beats resting your hard drive on a stack of playing cards.

Triple Pirouette

The lights will just might turn your desk into a semi-conservative rave.

The running man

Though it's easy to set up, installing the four screws may be taxing.

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