Ineo NA307 & NA302Ue Hard Drive Enclosures Review

Interior Impressions (NA302Ue)

By simply spinning off the four corner screws and lifting off the top cover panel you can easily see the PCB of this external unit. If you want, you can then unscrew a couple more screws and removed the PCB to get a good look at it.


Before we get to the PCB though lets look at the mesh sides and why they are only there for a façade and are not actually useful. When you remove the side panel the very first thing which pops out is these big convex metallic silver strips that run around three of the four sides. These strips are there to reflect the blue LEDS and give the unit a nice blue glue but all these reflectors will block hot air from escaping. We are not sure about you, but to us an eerie blue glow is all well and fine but its not fine when it has a negative impact on hard drive temperatures. Honestly, what was Ineo thinking when they hobbled this unit's passive cooling capabilities in the search for increased bling?


The PCB is fairly cluttered on one side with the various power connectors and capacitors but this should have a minimal negative effect on cooling.


The first thing which stands out is all those small capacitors. In total you have 10 of these Chang caps. All these caps are rated for 105° C and it is highly doubtful if they will ever even get close to this temperature. There are many pros and cons to using multiple small capacitors rather than the more standard one or two large ones; but in the end it really does not matter since if they do swell, they are fairly easy to replace if you have any soldiering skills.


The brain of this unit is the Sunplus SATALink SPIF215A-HF021controller chip. This chip is a bridge controller chip which melds both a USB high-speed device port and a SATA 1.5G host port together into one single chip controller. This controller chip is the same chip used in the Eagle Consus M Enclosure we reviewed awhile back and is even the same (albeit a older revision) of the chip in the just recently review Tagan IB-390. In past tests it yielded some very impressive results so we have some high expectations for it once again.