There are a lot of good qualities to list off about external hard drives, but security and high-performance generally don’t make the Top 20. Now, though, you have a solution available that will appeal to customers ranging from the enterprise down to enthusiast consumers. CRU-DataPort specializes in removable drives and external drive enclosures, but the item that I want to spotlight this month is one of the company’s entry-level units, the Serial ATA DataPort V plus.

The idea here will be familiar to anyone who has ever installed a drive with mounting rails. A cast aluminum frame mounts into a 5.25” bay. Into the back of the frame is mounted a small circuit board. On the outer side of this PCB is a SATA data connector and a 4-wire ATX power connector. On the inner side of the board are the side-by-side SATA data and power connectors found on most new SATA drives. (Beware, though: you might run across some early SATA drive models that use ATX-style power connectors, and these won’t plug into the frame’s PCB.)
The drive itself screws into a cast aluminum carrier, which comes complete with a snap-on lid so that the drive is totally encased. The carrier also sports a thermal probe and dual ball bearing fan—a must-have feature for high-speed SATA drives. Front panel LEDs show power and activity status, and there’s an alarm in case of fan failure. You’ll also note the lock on the front panel—high-security customers are likely to appreciate the feature.

Which brings us to the main point: Who needs this? In a corporate setting, the benefit is security. A drive that is offline can’t be hacked, either from inside or outside. High-end consumers and small biz buyers alike will appreciate the element of data portability. Imagine a user with 200GB of video files who needs to transport his collection from one place to another. Just pull the carrier out of system A and plug it into system B. Transfers remain at the native speed of SATA, not the crippled throughput of 1394 or USB. The product also makes great sense for resellers owing to the return business potential. Once users “get it,” they’ll be back for additional carriers and drive frames.

Note that CRU-DataPort also makes a line of series V devices with integrated 3DES encryption, so drive contents are only accessible if the physical decryption key is plugged into the frame’s front bezel. Additionally, there is now a DataPort for 2.5” drives that mounts into a 3.5” bay, and a DataPort than mounts two drives into a single 5.25” bay is reputedly on its way.

Biostar
iDEQ 200T
MSRP: $269
www.biostar-usa.com

Generally, Shuttle’s XPC line of barebones boxes gather all the headlines in the SFF space—and for plenty of good reasons. But Shuttle is not the only game in town, and several rivals have risen up in the past year to challenge the XPC’s reign. I’ve tested nearly all of the major SFF lines in the North American market, and while most of them are good machines with their own specific areas of excellence (examples: MSI’s killer radio integration and FIC’s ultra-slick portable design), the only real direct challenge to the XPC today is Biostar’s 200 series.

For performance users, the two models of choice within the line are the nForce3-based 200N and the Intel 865G-based 200T. As the 200T recently had a model refresh (a BIOS update, actually) in order to support Prescott CPUs, that’s the model we’ll look at here.
The distinguishing feature of the 200 series is its sliding front plastic panel , which moves vertically to conceal the external 5.25” and 3.5” bays (one of each) behind a clean, blank face. I’ve always found PC doors to be cumbersome because of the extra effort they require, and I suspect if Biostar had the 200 family to design over again the company might opt for spring-hinged bay doors, such as those used by AOpen. Then again, with no springs, there’s one less thing to fail on the iDEQ, and the closed-up look is really aesthetically cool.

Biostar smartly ignores the idea of a door over its bottom-front data ports (one 6-wire 1394 port, optical SPDIF, mic and headphone, and two USB ports) and instead recesses them to mute their presence. On the backplane, Biostar plants three 1/8” audio jacks (reassignable to 6-channel), PS/2, optical SPDIF out, 9-pin serial, VGA, 6-wire 1394, two more USB ports, and 10/100 LAN. There are also punch-outs for additional serial, parallel, and game ports, which is both unusual and praiseworthy given the enthusiast target audience.

Under the hood, Biostar’s true brilliance comes to light. The 200T places the AGP slot inside of the PCI slot, which is the reverse of most SFF designs and allows for oversized cards such as NVIDIA’s 5900 series. Like most SFFs, the 200T sports two 3.5” bays (one internal, one external), but Biostar uses Intel’s ICH5R southbridge to provide SATA RAID functionality. Biostar’s cable management, bundling, and labeling is the best of any SFF I’ve seen, bar none, and it makes building a full configuration in this barebones system markedly easier than usual.
Most noteworthy of all is Biostar’s cooling system. There are two fans in the box, one that drags air off the northbridge heatsink and blows it into the CPU heatsink, then another that draws air from the CPU heatsink and blows it outside the chassis. Additionally, if you look at the bottom of the case, you’ll see three dents. Each of these melds with a strip of thermal tape that sticks to the bottom of the motherboard beneath the CPU, northbridge, and southbridge, effectively turning the bottom of the 200T into an oversized heatsink. Not only is this design very effective at keeping the 200T cool, even when overclocked, but it also runs extremely quietly. Users are able to fine tune the smart fan settings both in the BIOS and via a Windows applet.

Last and definitely not least, the 200T is the fastest Springdale-based SFF machine I’ve ever had the pleasure of testing. The only way Biostar might improve this would be to implement the notorious PAT hack in the BIOS and render the 865 into a virtual 875, but this is a minor point, as is the fact that the integrated Intel Extreme Graphics 2 video is nearly useless for contemporary 3D apps. Still, now that this model is Prescott-compatible, the 200T will likely emerge as the SFF of choice for Intel users until Grantsdale-based units arrive later in the year to replace it.