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#911 - Kingwin Z1 Series External Enclosure |
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Written by Zach Jeffers
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Tuesday, 15 January 2008 |
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Page 3 of 4
Installation and Testing:
For testing of the Kingwin Z1 external hard drive enclosure, we used the following hardware:
Enclosure: Antec P190 (Noctua NF-S12 intake fans) with included PSU's
Processor: AMD 3800+ X2 (Socket AM2)
Motherboard: ECS
KA3 MVP
Memory: Crucial
Ballistix 2gig (2 x 1gig) DDR2 PC2-6400
Video: Zotac 8600GTS 256mb 256bit DDR3 PCI-E x16
Internal Storage: 2 x 320gig Seagate 7200.10 SATA2 RAID0
External Storage: 500gig Seagate 7200.9 SATA2
Optical: Plextor PX-740UF
To install a hard drive into the Kingwin Z1 external enclosure, you will need to first remove the two screws at the top and bottom of the back plate. Once you have removed these two screws, the plate comes off and you can then slide the hard drive tray out the other side of the unit. With the tray removed you can see the universal shaping of the aluminum shell.
 
 
The Z1’s hard drive tray is made of plastic and features SATA power and data connectivity without option for PATA or Molex power connections. Down the side of the tray there is a power lead for the front LED power indicator.
 
Simply connect the power and data headers to your SATA hard drive and then lay the drive into the drive tray. One thing to note is that the SATA connections were upside down so some twisting and finessing will be necessary.
 
With the hard drive snugly resting within the hard drive tray, you can then secure the drive to the tray with four included mounting screws. During our tests, we ran into a problem where we were only able to install a single screw and the other three screws were not able to line up. The below picture will hopefully illustrate the issue. The plastic tray gets in the way of the hard disc. We tried this will all three of our samples that Kingwin was kind enough to send us. Each of these samples experienced the same problem. We also tried other drives like a Western Digital 2500YS and a Seagate 7200.10. Each drive had the same result.
Once your drive is installed and secured, you can slide the tray back into place and screw down the external plates. The Kingwin enclosure simply sits within the included plastic stand. This stand has no weight to it and simply provides a wider footprint for the enclosure. With the power and data cables coming off the back, this is pretty much useless and we ended up testing on the Z1 enclosure on it’s side.
 
 
With the drive turned on and in operation, the Z1 logo on the front aluminates a cool Blue color. There is only a single color LED and it is always on. Sorry folks, no HDD activity LED on this enclosure.
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