Thermaltake are a company its hard not to have heard of. Offering cooling solution for everything from full chasis down to external hard drive enclosures they are a top-brand and today we take a look at the smaller of their range, specifically the Vi-On actively cooled external HDD enclosure.

Removing the protective packaging reveals a two part product, a main section which houses the hard disk and a the smaller slanted section which the main sections fits into. Overall the design isn’t too bad although the decision to go with plastic for something that is going to sit on my desktop all day isn’t perhaps what I’d expect from such a reputable company. On top of that the plastic is a real smudge and smear victim with even just setting it up putting awful marks all over the new shiny black plastic.

Moving past the aesthetics, setting up the product up was fairly simple; there are four screws holding the case together, just remove those and just slide the drive in until it clicks and you’ll soon know if you’ve done it right, because if you haven’t the side won’t go back on the case! Now we’re ready to go!

The device is advertised as being plug and play ready or XP/Vista and Mac OS 9.04+ so I decided to try it out on my friend’s Mac machine with bootcamp. Needless to say the unit worked seamlessly with each OS, quickly being recognised and ready to go. As with all external hard drives there are two really important things, is it quick and is it quiet?

Turning to the first one, the speed is decent but nothing earth shattering, a 2Gb file was written to the disk in 53 seconds and read in 48 seconds using the eSata connection. With USB2.0, the same file was written in 1 min 4seconds and read in1 minute 1 second.

Now, whilst the speed was decent, the volume wasn’t. At load you could easily here the fan of the enclosure over the ambient noise and that of my case. This is quite surprising because the enclosure never got that hot and it makes you wonder if the fan’s scaling was a bit out of whack.

One thing that definitely didn’t help the temperature was the use of plastic for the main shell. Obviously it saves on costs but in terms of aesthetics and also pure heat dissipation, aluminium would have been a much wiser choice and would really have improved this slightly under-thought product.

Overall I have to admit that despite having quite high hopes for this enclosure is simply doesn’t deliver. Of course it does everything an enclosure should do; it doesn’t overheat, files transfer quickly and it is half-decent to look at. Plus it has great plug and play compatibility. But over time I can see the plastic and the fan volume really driving me round the bend to the point when I take the slightly odd shaped thing and through it out the window!

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