Features
Rosewill makes several external hard drive enclosures and the RX81-MP-SC-SLV we are looking at today is one of them. The enclosure will work with up to 1TB drives and can connect to your PC via eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and USB. The chassis is made from aluminum and optimized for heat dissipation.

The enclosure is compatible with Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP/Vista, Linux 2.4.1.0, and Mac OS 8.6 and up. Included with the system are an external power adapter and one of each cable for needed for the four available connectivity options.

Installation & Use
I installed a 1TB Seagate SATA HDD inside the enclosure for testing. Installation is straightforward and not complicated. All you need is the hard drive and a small Philips head screw driver. To install the drive you remove the stand by removing the four screws holding it on the bottom. You then remove the two screws holding the aluminum housing to the internal drive cage. Once you remove the screws, you simply slide the internal drive cage out of the aluminum housing.

This was one of the only points where I had a problem with the enclosure. The aluminum flexes when you insert or remove the internal drive cage from the outer enclosure. I pinched my finger in the outer housing when it flexed, so be careful.

Once the outer housing is off the drive cage, you remove four more small screws that are holding a thin aluminum heat shield in place. Once the heat shield is removed, you can see the board that powers and connects the drive to the computer.

Plugging the large 1TB drive into the board was easy and once plugged in you secure the drive with four screws on the underside of the drive cage. After the drive is secure, you simply reinstall the cage in the reverse order. The complete procedure took all of ten minutes.

Once the installation was done, I connected the enclosure to my computer with the provided eSATA cable. My Vista test computer recognized the drive immediately and the drive was ready to use. A green light on the front of the case glows when the drive is powered up and flashes slightly when the drive is in use.

Performance on the drive enclosure will vary depending on the drive you use and connectivity method you opt for. I did run a quick test on my set up with Sandra XII's removable storage benchmark. The drive had a read performance of 16 ops per minute (68.21 MB/s) and a write performance of 1356 ops per minute (45.5 MB/s). That is good performance and put the enclosure up there with some of the flash drives I have tested performance wise.