UMLan

We have done a fair share of internal and external enclosure reviews. So you might say we have an extensive experience in field. It is definitely tough to find the right enclosure for the job now a days, specially when there are thousands of different kind of enclosures on the market. Most of them do not come with a hard drive and well that's a pity, however some that do are very valuable. Today we are going to review a hybrid type of the hard drive enclosure, I-NA205Ue by Ineo Technologies. I-NA205Ue is a 2.5" hard drive enclosure which allows to users to use it as a carry on device and also being able to use it in a stationary computer without any cables. Lets take a closer look at I-NA205Ue and see what its made of.

The ineo I-NA205Ue is a external hard disk drive enclosure with chassis which can be used in 2 different ways. Connect it with a USB cable while at work using a laptop. Slide into a PC while at home without any cable or power adapter. It has the mobility to provide the best solution to keep data between different laptop and PC up-to-date and to carry important information securely and conveniently.

No extra cable or power adapter is needed while at home. Simply slide into the chassis in your PC.
Truly Plug and Play & Hot Swappable
USB Bus Powered
Blue LED Status Indicators
Aluminum Alloy Casing
Plastic Chassis

Support 2.5" SATA I/II Hard Disk Drives up to 500GB
USB2.0 Transfer rates up to 480Mbps
eSATA Transfer rates up to 3Gbps
Dimension (W x D x H): 82 x 135 x 14 (mm)
Windows ME/98/NT/2000/2003/XP/Vista, MAC, Linux

Now that we got basic information out of the way, lets take a closer look at I-NA205Ue.

The packaging of I-NA205Ue is constructed with a cardboard box and has white, black, blue color schema to it. It is rather plain design but has all of the useful information about the unit inside. There are few logos of "Ineo" all over the box.

On the side of the box we found a list of Features and Specifications of the I-NA205Ue. I-NA205Ue is a High speed USB 2.0 portable enclosure for 2.5" hard drives. The maximum capacity of the disk drive which could be used in I-NA205Ue is 500 gb. However we did found a type o in the Specifications "Support HDD Capacity up to 320 MB" I think that was meant to me 500 GB.

Opening the box and getting the I-NA205Ue unit with all of its accessories wasn't hard. Just a few pulls and picks and everything came out nicely. Everything was pretty tightly packed and i am kind of surprised that everything fit in the small box. The contents of this package are I-NA205Ue unit, hard plastic enclosure, USB 2.0 Y cable, eSATA cable and power cable for the unit. I-NA205Ue also comes with a screwdriver for the installations which is very handy and a simple mesh pouch for the transport.

The plastic chassis for the I-NA205Ue is designed to be mounted in the floppy drive slot of your desktop machine. I-NA205Ue slides right in the enclosure and locks itself. If you would like to release the lock, just push on the I-NA205Ue unit and it will unlock itself. This chassis comes with 18 inch SATA connector and molex power adapter.

This whole contraption is powered by a spring which provides the tension between I-NA205Ue and the chassis. The overall quality of the chassis is fair but i cant help to think that Ineo didn't spend enough time designing this unit.

The actual I-NA205Ue has aluminum alloy casing and rather appealing to the eye and skin. I-NA205Ue has only one logo in the front and on the reverse side has some miscellaneous information about the unit such as serial number and sku.

On the back of the unit we found a Power socket, eSATA connector and USB 2.0 connector. In the front of the unit there are two LED's one for power and one for hard drive activity.

I was wondering why this unit didn't come with mounting screws until we have opened I-NA205Ue and found a bag of screws for mounting the chassis. Installing the hard drive was not hard at all. There are no screws to hold the hard drive down but it sits pretty tight inside of the enclosure.

When powered on, the front of I-NA205Ue shows "Power" and hard drive activity in light blue color. Installing the chassis enclosure was easy too. Just a few screws to hold it in the place and that's pretty much it.

For our testing we are going to be using HD Tach 3.0.4.0 to perform benchmarks on a Seagate mementos 2.5" hard drive. Lets see what numbers we get with I-NA205Ue.

Running HD Tach with USB 2.0 connection we got an average read of 35.1 MB/s and burst speeds as high as 38.1 MB/s. This is pretty much all you can get out of the USB 2.0 connection.

Running the same benchmark but only under the eSATA connection gave us much faster throughput of average read of 50.4 MB/s and 131.5 burst speed. This speeds are also normal for the eSATA connection.

It is tough to judge whether this particular unit will be a good fit for everyone, but if you are looking for some cheap way to access your files this might be it. If you are looking for a faster access to upload and download of files to the hard drive, i would recommend using eSATA connection or look in to the USB 3.0 enclosure. With USB 3.0 knocking at our doors it would be a smart idea to revise I-NA205Ue and make it USB 3.0 compatible. I would also recommend to lose the chassis for the computer or revise that also. It felt like Ineo didn't spent enough time on that part of the I-NA205Ue. Overall our experience with I-NA205Ue was a pleasant one and we would recommend it for an average user.