Antec MX-1 Review
Despite it's ever-so-sexy name and it's undeniably attractive main feature (an external SATA hard drive enclosure), the Antec MX-1 is best of breed and worthy of your hard earned/stolen cash.
As some of you know, I get paid to review tech products. A sweet gig for someone who enjoys technology when i get to play around with a new TV, video game console, smartphone, etc. Sometimes, on the other hand, something like the Antec MX-1 shows up on my doorstep. An external hard drive enclosure? Really? I barely could contain my excitement but like the diligent reviewer that i am, I carried the large box up to get to work.
Basically, this thing is a box that holds a hard drive (a thing where you store all your music/documents/movies/programs/etc). What's nice about it, is that it is portable. Want to bring your entire music and movie collection over to a friends place? Done. Want to copy files to and from work? Done.
They were nice enough to send me Seagate's relatively new 7200.10 750gb monster hard drive with the Antec MX-1. For uninitiated (read: cool people), this hard drive can hold roughly 170,000 Mp3's, 1200 ripped dvd movies, and about 89 million word documents. In other words, booyah.
Installation was fairly simple and took me about 10 minutes. There were some annoyingly placed small screws that i was sure Antec made purely to anger me but once those were vanquished, the installation was fairly smooth. The construction and build quality of this enclosure is top notch and even has a large, active cooling fan to keep all of your saved Mp3's cool and under control.
The "cool" thing about the MX-1 one is that you can hook it up to your computer in two ways (choices are fun): USB 2.0 or ESATA. USB should be familiar to anyone who has plugged their iPod into their computer but ESATA is probably known only in the closed circles of uber-nerdom. In short, it is an extremely fast interface to connect peripherals to and alleviates the main problem of external hard drives: they are too slow to use for programs and sometimes just too slow in general if you are moving a massive amount of files. ESATA is literally like adding another internal hard drive to your computer--there is (almost) zero performance decrease when using an ESATA enclosure+drive compared to an internal drive. I copied 80gb of movies to the Antec MX-1 in under 23 minutes (in Vista). Just in case you don't know, that's fast.
Of course, ESATA is only an option on relatively newer desktop computers (laptops need not apply) but if you have the luxury of having purchased a desktop computer in the last year and a half, there is a very good chance that you can connect this drive via ESATA. Worst case scenario you hook it up to your computer using the still capable (and speedy) USB 2.0.
If you have an ESATA port (or SATA internally) on your desktop, just buy the Antec MX-1 and a roomy hard drive to go with it. If you are not blessed with access to ESATA, i would still recommend this enclosure if you're someone who likes the best (plus it gives you the option of going ESATA in the future).
Bottom Line: CoolSlice.com Highly Recommended
As some of you know, I get paid to review tech products. A sweet gig for someone who enjoys technology when i get to play around with a new TV, video game console, smartphone, etc. Sometimes, on the other hand, something like the Antec MX-1 shows up on my doorstep. An external hard drive enclosure? Really? I barely could contain my excitement but like the diligent reviewer that i am, I carried the large box up to get to work.
Basically, this thing is a box that holds a hard drive (a thing where you store all your music/documents/movies/programs/etc). What's nice about it, is that it is portable. Want to bring your entire music and movie collection over to a friends place? Done. Want to copy files to and from work? Done.
They were nice enough to send me Seagate's relatively new 7200.10 750gb monster hard drive with the Antec MX-1. For uninitiated (read: cool people), this hard drive can hold roughly 170,000 Mp3's, 1200 ripped dvd movies, and about 89 million word documents. In other words, booyah.
Installation was fairly simple and took me about 10 minutes. There were some annoyingly placed small screws that i was sure Antec made purely to anger me but once those were vanquished, the installation was fairly smooth. The construction and build quality of this enclosure is top notch and even has a large, active cooling fan to keep all of your saved Mp3's cool and under control.
The "cool" thing about the MX-1 one is that you can hook it up to your computer in two ways (choices are fun): USB 2.0 or ESATA. USB should be familiar to anyone who has plugged their iPod into their computer but ESATA is probably known only in the closed circles of uber-nerdom. In short, it is an extremely fast interface to connect peripherals to and alleviates the main problem of external hard drives: they are too slow to use for programs and sometimes just too slow in general if you are moving a massive amount of files. ESATA is literally like adding another internal hard drive to your computer--there is (almost) zero performance decrease when using an ESATA enclosure+drive compared to an internal drive. I copied 80gb of movies to the Antec MX-1 in under 23 minutes (in Vista). Just in case you don't know, that's fast.
Of course, ESATA is only an option on relatively newer desktop computers (laptops need not apply) but if you have the luxury of having purchased a desktop computer in the last year and a half, there is a very good chance that you can connect this drive via ESATA. Worst case scenario you hook it up to your computer using the still capable (and speedy) USB 2.0.
If you have an ESATA port (or SATA internally) on your desktop, just buy the Antec MX-1 and a roomy hard drive to go with it. If you are not blessed with access to ESATA, i would still recommend this enclosure if you're someone who likes the best (plus it gives you the option of going ESATA in the future).
Bottom Line: CoolSlice.com Highly Recommended
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