Eagle N-Series Pro External HDD Enclosures

Access to the inside of the Eagle N-Series Pro is by removal of four slotted screws per side.  One side allows access to putting your drive in place while the other allows access for you to screw the drive in place.  Notice how the base of the N-Series Pro has four long slots positioned where you would find the screw points on any current hard drive.  Pretty fast and simple but using thumb screws to remove both side panels and including four more short based thumb screws for the drive would have made the unit tool free.  A few bucks at a hardware shop can fix that however.  I'm hoping Eagle will take this down for future revisions though.

The SATA and power ports for the drive were fantastic!  These ports are static and you slide the drive in place rather than plugging in cables as we've seen elsewhere.  Great thinking!

Here's a quick shot of the drive installed.  Not too cramped but not excessively big either which is good - this is a drive enclosure and you want it compact.

Performance

To put our Eagle N-Series Pro's performance to the test we are going to use the HD Tach program on a Western Digital 7200 RPM 300GB SATA HDD.  HD Tach will give us average read and burst speed in MB/sec as well as random access speed times.  Pulled out my far from overpowered AMD Turion MT-40 powered Acer laptop to serve as our test bed let's have at it.

Conclusion

Performance wise, the Eagle N-Series Pro is right in line with other USB 2.0 drive enclosures.  What makes the Eagle stand out is it's $22 price tag.  It's a back to basics product that is aimed squarely at the USB crowd only.  External SATA drives are nice and expand a product's audience but it's the USB shoppers who are the vast majority.  The N-Series Pro's clean lines and functional stand ensure that the Eagle will get a lot of looks as it can easily blend in with most any desk setup.  The inclusion of the trial version of Disk Doctor's Data Recovery program may or may not be nice.  It's the type of thing you shelve until you have to "try it".  Since I don't have any bad disks around or desire to intentionally corrupt some data intentionally I'm not going to get into testing it.

The only real faults we could find was Eagle not using thumb screws for the side panels and including four extra to secure the drive.  This would have made the product tool free and pushed it into Editor's Choice territory.  However, the pricing can be ignored and you get a lot of value for your hard earned dollar.  The Eagle N-Series Pro won't disappoint.  Definitely worth a look if you are shopping out external USB drive enclosures.  Our thanks to Eagle for supporting this review.

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