so this is another leadup to an upcoming episode of NCIX Tech tips where we'll be
looking at uh USB 3.0 versus USB 2.0
which is here versus firewire versus ESAT so the whole point of this is to
get myself a couple of uh identical enclosures other than the interface to
the hard drive get myself a couple of identical hard drives and then a
motherboard that features all of these different interfaces so that I can do an
Apples to Apples comparison and show you just how much speed difference there
actually is between all of these different interfaces if you are you know
trying to decide whether it's worth it to Spring for a new USB 3.0 hard drive
enclosure and motherboard or if you want to just stick with theat or wow there's
a lot of accessories with this guy so this is an Acom data enclosure and it
actually has a number of different interfaces on it so this is their Samba
quad and the reason it's called quad is because it has support for eSATA you see
it has an included eSATA cable very nice thank you then it has uh what is this
one fire wire 800 I believe okay I won't
actually be testing firewire 800 unfortunately CU I don't have a FireWire
800 compatible motherboard cuz as far as I can tell there was like one ever then
there's firewire 400 so we have a cable for that as well and then we have a
cable for USB 2.0 so they've included
all of the cables you need no matter how you're going to hook hook it up then
they've also included two black screws
and six other ones so two of them are
small three four of them are hard drive these are hard drive screws so I don't
know what the rest of them are for but we'll get into that later then we have a
manual so this is uh English and French by the look of things and it shows
you what to do some precautions you know don't run it in water stuff like that
package content system requirements uh you can pause it and read this if you
really want to okay then we have a stand for the bottom so we'll we'll show that
after then we have a power cord which plugs into the back of this power
brick which then plugs into the back of the hard drive so just like that it's
quite a large power brick but i' I'd rather see one that is is has a
dedicated cord so that it doesn't sit and take up two slots on my uh on my
power bar okay so then there's our stand
here is the samba quad so you can see
right off the that it is full of interfaces so here's USB 2.0 here's fire
wire 400 firewire 800 firewire 800 again
eat and then power then we've got a
power switch here as well as oh this explains what those other two black
screws are for Acom data has installed only two screws and I guess that is
enough to hold it in place anyway so let's have a look at the outside of the
enclosure unlike the one that I looked at uh just previous to this this one has
kind of a fingerprint proof matte black coating on it that I actually prefer I
think that's quite nice and it's also going to sort of retain its uh new look
over a lot longer period of time I think so you can see even when I leave a
fingerprint it kind of Fades away that's pretty nice got their logo and
everything at the front you've got kind of a grilled
meshy sort of bit here this is a power switch and uh presumably uh some kind of
an activity LED but I'm not 100% sure I will find out when I do my tech tips
episode just going to take these screws out of the back and then uh cuz I'm
going to be installing hard drives in these things shortly anyway so might as
well take it apart there we go okay who it's all
coming apart oh unlike the other one it's also metal inside which is uh I
think a step in the right direction um rather than using like a plastic
interior to mount the hard drive it uses a very similar interface to uh to mount
the hard drive though you're just going to put the drive down slide it back onto
the SATA interface here and then you're going to screw it in from the bottom
four screws here you can see we've actually got a far more complicated PCB
compared to the uh the samba USB super speed that we looked at got a couple of
chips on there not sure what either of them does and I don't think it's fair to
expect me to do that right on right on uh camera here anyway and then we've got
the uh wires for the power switch which is here at the back and then also inside
I guess I can show you the bottom where this wire is taped into place and then
oh I can also show you how the uh how the stand at the bottom works so I guess
you slide this in from no no what I'm guessing you do is you turn this around
and then you um yeah I don't know how this works but
it goes in here somehow it slides in there and then it's something to do with
these holes in here so you screw it in somehow and then good things happen so
thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Acom data Samba quad and don't
forget to check out the followup we're going to have up hopefully here I'm
going to give the cameraman a Target in the next week on USB 3.0 versus 2.0
versus firewire versus EA