Tagan IB-390 Hard Drive Enclosure Review

Extended Runtime Testing

Where these units are marketed towards the home environment, it is reasonable to expect them to be able to handle moderate usage, with random reads and writes of various sizes. To test how good the passive cooling design of this unit is, a Seagate 7200.10 320gb HDD installed into the IB-390 was subjected to a 24hr torture session. During this time IOMeter was setup to run for 24 hours using various size tests all with completely random read/write scenarios.

During this testing the drive only got hit slightly above 40° C, but this is very adequate considering the chosen hard drive runs hot under the best of circumstances. For the whole time the enclosed drive had no active cooling and it was completely up to the metal case of the IB-390 to dissipate the heat it generates. All in all this was very good and was only eclipsed by this units performance when in its docking station in a PC. Because of the cut outs on the bottom of the docking station, the air movement inside our CM 690 was more than good enough to keep this drive well below 40° and while it was running hotter than if it had been placed in the internal drive bay it was at not time in danger of overheating.

Conclusion

Usually when we see a unique idea or refinement upon a tried, tested and true concept the first generation can be a little rough around the edges; however this is not the case when it comes to the IB-390. The uber user-friendly installation and removal (via the spring loaded button and arm) is simple and intuitive. This to us turns an otherwise very good perfomer into a excellent product which will appeal to a broad range of consumers

Now as ingenious as this docking station is, when all is said and done you are buying an external enclosure, so it had better be darn good at its main goal: portable performance. Luckily, this device is not only brilliantly engineered it is also a darn good external hard drive enclosure in its own right; the fact it is ships with a docking station is just icing on the cake.

As we saw in the testing phase the IB-390 posted some pretty impressive numbers, and while it appears that it is limited to SATA 1 this did little to curb its performance. In real world situations it is highly doubtful anyone will notice a burst speed of 130MB/s versus 200MB/s, np matter how it looks on a fancy graph. Also on the positive side it appears that the USB performance of the Sunplus controller chip has been improved upon and that is always a nice to see a manufacturer continually striving to improve upon its already great performing chip.

The only areas that we can see which need room for improvement is the installation of a hard drive into the IB-390 and that short SATA cable. Needing a small hook-like key to open two leavers is a less than optimal design and how many people are going to lose those small frickin’ keys over the lifespan of the unit? Yes, you technically don’t need the key to pry open the leavers but the fact of the matter is that it is this lazy engineering that really sticks out on such an otherwise slick unit. The same can be said about that SATA cord. It would hvae been much better to make it a normal internal connector (and of course include a normal length SATA cord with it) and allow people to use their own longer cords! This to us would be a better solution than requiring the docking station to be stuck way down in the 5.25 bays. Please Tagan, put some pressure on RaidSonic to tweak these design flaws so that it can achieve the greatness we can see in it.

In the end this is a very good enclosure that comes with a good docking station and while many different words could be used to describe the Tagan IB-390 but we think two fit it perfectly: Dam Innovative. If you are looking for an external enclosure that can be used as an 5.25 bay drive then this bad boy should be right there close to the top of your list.

Pros:
- Good USB and eSATA performance
- High quality construction
- Ingenious Docking station

Cons:
- Short attached SATA cable on dock
- Key installation is less than optimal design