Two into one goes nicely

Trade

With hard drive capacities heading ever skyward, many PC owners – having upgraded from, say, 120Gb to 500Gb – find themselves left with spare but still useable storage on their hands. What to do with this hardware? Binning HDDs is not a clever solution, since personal data could fall into unscrupulous hands and, in any case, they can be put to good use.

One solution might be to buy a couple of caddies and hook them up to the PC, thus gaining extra storage space. However, a more elegant resolution comes from Sharkoon in the shape of an external twin-drive case, complete with the necessary cabling and plugs. An additional benefit of the Sharkoon Twin Drive is that it instantly provides the user with mobile memory; simply unplug and go.

Fans are not needed as the twin case sits outside the PC base. Also, in addition to the housing being made of heat-dissipating aluminium, its front and back panels are made from a fine metal mesh to let air flow through the case.

Those who like to show off their one-upmanship could slot two gigabyte drives into the Sharkoon case and boast about having a terabyte of mobile storage space.

The two hard drives, once slotted into the twin-drive case, are operated using the integrated controller, either over the master-slave configuration or in Cable Select mode. The controller has two 4-pin power connections and an IDE cable with two 40-pin hard drive connections. The Twin Drive uses a fast USB 2.0 connection for data transfer to and from the PC, and a power adapter is supplied.

Despite housing two drives, the case measures just 11 x 20 x 6.5 cm. A slide-in caddy for the drives is easy to insert and remove from the housing using four knurled screws, the heads of which also act as vibration-damping feet.

The Sharkoon Twin Drive supports USB 2.0 and Plug n Play. Data transfer rate is up to 480 MBit/s, and it is compatible with Windows ME/2000/XP and Mac OS 9.x or higher.

Back I/O (external):
1 x USB2.0 connector (compatible with 1.x)
1 x power connector
Connectors (internal):
2 x 3,5″ IDE HDD connector
Colour: black

www.sharkoon.com

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