Tagan IB-390 Hard Drive Enclosure Review

INTERIOR IMPRESSIONS

Taking apart this enclosure is actually fairly easy, in fact you have to take it apart to put in a hard drive. If you want to be complete in your take down you can pop off those four little screw caps and remove the plastic guide which keeps everything lined up inside, but this really is overkill and will void your warranty. The normal route is to simply use the included pry bar (which to us looks a lot like a locksmith's broken key extractor).


To be able to pry open the two metal leavers located on the back of the drive, you pop out the plastic cap which hides the “key hold” so to speak and then pry them open one by one. When this is accomplished you simply use the attached plastic cap to pull out the internals.


When this simple task is complete all which stands between you and success is a few screws which hold the hard drive cage subassembly to the controller board. All in all its fairly quick and easy to disassemble and all is require is a modicum of curiosity.


As you can see the very first thing which is blatantly obvious is the fact this is a passively cooled device. This is quite acceptable as unless you plan on torturing your hard drives (like we do later in the testing stage) passive cooling is all is required. The second thing which does pop out is how sparse the insides of this enclosure really are. You have a few capacitors, an SATA power and data port, a controller chip and that’s about it.


The brain of this unit is the Sunplus SPIF215A-HL231 controller chip. This chip is a bridge controller chip which blends a USB high-speed device port and a SATA 1.5G host port together into one single chip controller. For all you eagle eyed readers out there, yes this is the same chipset used in the Eagle Consus M Enclosure we reviewed awhile back; even though both end in a different “–XX123” (HL231 vs HF021) it is the same chip just a slightly different revision of it. It will be interesting to see if this version of the SPIF215A is as good as the previous revisions.


Just as the controller of the IB390 is the same as the one on the Eagle Consus M so to is the single capacitor. Both companies are using Changzhou Huawei Electronics Co capacitors. While very little is known about “Chang” capacitors (which can be considered both a good thing as no one is complaining about them or bad thing because no one is raving about them either) other than the fact they have been in business since 1987 and they make over 4 billion aluminum electrolytic capacitors every year. While this sounds like a lot (and it is) it only places them in the 53rd place for Chinese Electronic Components top 100. In any case, (and just like the Eagle Consus M) the capacitor used on the IB-390 is rated for 105°C which is much more than necessary but is always nice to see.


Taking apart the docking station is neither needed nor justified as the bottom cutouts show it literally is nothing more than a SATA power and data dock molded into a plastic box which fits in any 5.25” bay of your computer case. As we said earlier this is a brilliant move and since there is no additional controller chip or capacitors needed it also has the added benefit of keeping costs fairly low. Which is something we can all agree is a good thing.