Gadgetory

so this is another lead up to an upcoming episode of NCIS tech tips where we'll be looking at USB 3.0 versus USB 2.0 which is here versus firewire vs. eSATA so the whole point of this is to get myself a couple of identical enclosures other than the interface to the hard drive get myself a couple of identical hard drives and then a motherboard that features all of these different interfaces so that I can do an apples-to-apples comparison and show you just how much speed difference there actually is between all of these different interfaces if you are you know trying to decide whether it's worth it to spring for a new USB 3.0 hard drive enclosure and motherboard or if you want to just stick with these SATA or Wow there's a lot of accessories with this guy so this is an 8 comdata enclosure and it actually has a number of different interfaces on it so this is their samba quad and the reason it's called quad is because it has support for eSATA you see it has an included eSATA cable very nice thank you then it has what is this one firewire 800 I believe ok I won't actually be testing firewire 800 unfortunately because I don't have a firewire 800 compatible motherboard because as far as I can tell there was like one ever then there's firewire 400 so we have a cable for that as well and then we have a cable for USB 2.0 so they've included all of the cables you need no matter how you're gonna hook it up then they've also included two black screws and six other ones so two of them are small three eight four of them are hard drive these are hard drive screws so I don't know what the rest of them are for but we'll get into that later then we have a manual so this is English and French by the look of things and it shows you what to do some precautions you know don't run it in water stuff like that package content system requirements you can pause it and read this if you really want to ok then we have a stand for the bottom so we'll show that after then we have a power cord which plugs into the back of this power brick which then plugs into the back of the hard drive like that it's quite a large power brick but I'd rather see one that says all has a dedicated cord so that it doesn't sit and take up two slots on my my power bar here is the Samba quad so you can see right off the bat it is full of interfaces so here is USB 2.0 here's firewire 400 firewire 800 firewire 800 again eSATA and then power then we've got a power switch here as well as oh this explains what those other two black screws are for a comm beta has installed only two screws and I guess that is enough to hold it in place anyway so let's have a look at the outside of the enclosure unlike the one that I looked at just previous to this this one has kind of a fingerprint proof matte black coating on it that I actually prefer I think that's quite nice and it's also going to sort of retain its a new look over a lot longer period of time I think so you can see even when I leave a fingerprint it kind of fades away that's pretty nice got their logo and everything at the front you've got kind of a grilled mesh II sort of bit here this is a power switch and presumably some kind of an activity LED but I'm not a hundred percent sure I will find out when I do my tech tips episode I'm just gonna take these screws out of the back because I'm gonna be installing hard drives in these things shortly anyway so might as well take it apart so unlike the other one it's also metal inside which is I think a step in the right direction rather than using like a plastic interior to mount the hard drive uses a very similar interface to to mount the hard drive though you're just gonna put the drive down slide it back onto the SATA interface here and then you're gonna screw it in from the bottom four screws here you can see we've actually got a far more complicated PCB compared to the the Samba USB super speed that we looked at got a couple of chips on they're not sure what either of them does and I don't think it's fair to expect me to do that right on right on camera here anyway and then we've got the wires for the power switch which is here at the back and then also inside guess I can show you the bottom where this wire is taped into place and then oh I can also show you how the hmm how the stand at the bottom works so I guess you just slide this in from no no what I'm guessing you do is you turn this around and then you dad I know how this works but it goes in here somehow this slides in there and then it's something to do with these holes in here so you screw it in somehow and then good things happen so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the a combi de Samba quad and don't forget to check out the follow up we're gonna have up hopefully here I'm gonna get the cameraman at Target in the next week on USB 3.0 versus 2.0 versus firewire versus eSATA