Cooler Master X-Craft 360 gets worked over

27 Sep 2007 | 16:03 BST

By Rob Kerr

First INQpressions The internal HDD external drive of choice

Product: Cooler Master X-Craft 360
Website: www.coolermaster.com/X360
System Requirements: Intel Pentium II processor or better, Apple G3 Processor or better. Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista, Mac OS 9.3 higher. S-ATA HDD
Price: £30.00

COOLERMASTER sent in some products of late for us to have a look at on The Inquirer. The first we unboxed and took a gander at was their new X-Craft 360. It’s an external enclosure for 3.5-inch hard drive, with their edge on design and easy installation. Set to succeed their already popular 350, in more ways than one.

Cooler Master X-Craft 360

When accessory peripherals or periph-ory’s as we call them, come along that serve just one function they don’t always make for a good review. In saying or typing that, we find some actually so standout. This is one of those, just in case you were wondering.

Cooler Master X-Craft 360 – Box

The box ships with everything needed to get up and running from scratch, apart from the hard drive. We’re sure bundled offers will be available though. There’s always the other popular usage for a product like this, adapting existing HDD for an external storage solution when you’ve moved on to the largest and greatest. As seen below, power and data cables are all provided along with a caddy of-sorts for housing another drive when one is in use. Which highlights another function, but we’ll keep that for later on.

Cooler Master X-Craft 360 – Box Contents

There are a few things that stand out from other external hard drive products we’ve seen and used before. The first is that the hard drive installation is completely tool-free. The enclosures front clips open with the S-ATA hard drive just slipping in. This is followed by closing the X-Craft door, which shuttles the drive in and makes the data and power connection at the same time. It’s as simple as that; you’re all up and running within seconds. Inside the case are runners which aid in the drives track to the S-ATA port, providing comfort and no excess room for possible damage to the drive. They’ve also equipped the X-Craft 360 with a NSS – Non-Scratch S-ATA connector. All this just adds to the ease of installation for the novice and experts alike, along with a little peace of mind too.

Cooler Master X-Craft 360 – Install

Cooler Master X-Craft 360 – Install complete

The X-Craft 350 came in three different versions, where as the X-Craft 360 only comes in one. This consisted of; IDE to USB 2.0, IDE to USB 2.0 & IEEE1394a and S-ATA to eS-ATA & USB 2.0. All with a ceiling of 500GB and 10K RPM, for both HDD flavours.

This time around they’ve appealed to the more consummate consumer and bundled what they need in new X-Craft. These changes come in the form of eS-ATA and USB 2.0 ports, backward combatable though with 1.1 which wasn’t around before. Although what’s missing is FireWire support, then again it’s probably tough to decide which one to include – 400 or 800. We’d have gone with 800, just to keep in line with the higher-end style of the X-Craft 360.

Also the limit in terms of capacity has been lifted, which supports now just S-ATA I and II drives. We proved the new support by adding and using the Hitachi 1Terabyte drive in our tests. What’s more, the 360 is hot-swappable, the previous wasn’t. A nice, not often found feature in such products. This is where the caddy that comes to play, for a second HDD. Just to try out this feature we hot-swapped a few S-ATA drives, in various sizes all whilst the enclosure was powered up and in a live running OS. All of which worked well on both Window XP and VISTA, with no trouble at all. It’s good to see the Plug & Play or Plug & Prey aspect of the X-Craft works well.

The casing itself has come on from the rather plain and bog standard box enclosure from beforehand. Now its in-tune with swarve PC casings of today and does look far more pleasing to have next to the computer. The high quality aluminium encasing has a good solid robust feel to it, plus the sleek mirror finish diamond-black appearance is a nice touch. All this keeps the form of other Cool Master products. The mesh running down the sides of the case are there only for the drives cooling, but it comes across that it could have been added just for effect – as it looks that good.µ

X-Craft 350

X-Craft 360

In Short
An external hard drive enclosure needs to stand out these days as they’re all much of a muchness, they take an HDD and then just work. You then rely on the casings connectors to provide the data flow, which is usually where the bottle-neck resides. So we’re glad to see the eS-ATA connecter, which is more common on motherboards today than not and is the closest to internal speeds. In terms of standing out, the casing was the first that hit us - which is very easy on the eyes. Tool-free installation and hot-swappability functionality just sells it to us. µ

The Good
Tool free installation, e-SATA, USB - backward compatible, larger HDD support, hot-swappable

The Bad
No Firewire support

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