XSReviews

Introduction

Vizo make many products that generally involve hard discs. One of their key ventures is their range of hard drive enclosures, and today I have one to review; the stylish Vizo Luxon HDD Enclosure… Lets see how it performs

A little About Vizo

VIZO Technology Corp. is a leading global manufacturer and designer of computer peripheral products serving customers around the world. We own the best team and complete innovation technology. Utilizing experiences for many years and sufficient mature skills, VIZO insists in developing value added, ideal based, zeal catered and optimum designed products for customers to meet mainstream demands.That’s why we named VIZO.

VIZO provides the PC users a variety of PC DIY products and peripherals, including hard drive external enclosure, multimedia storage, front panel, mouse, PC fan, system cooling, cold cathode light, crystal neon light, card reader, USB hub, PC accessory and so on; Meanwhile, VIZO produces special effect products which can make your PC more stylish and unique.

VIZO’s vision is to make customers enjoy the high quality PC stuff all the time. To carry out it, VIZO aims at non-stop improvement, continuous innovation, excellent design, firm development and quality-improving technology and keeps putting all our effort in research and development. For high product quality, VIZO insists in the strict quality control process and owns highly recommended global product approval.

Luxon Specs

First Look

The box itself tells you a lot about what to expect once you open it up. There is a large image of the Luxon on the from of the box, with the back covered with the features and specs of the enclosure. The box itself is styled carefully and is well designed. It’s a sort of metallic finish on the card which adds to the class of the product.

Once the box is opened, you’ll find a well-packed box containing everything you need to get going. That includes:

Phew! As you can see you get a fair old amount with the Luxon.

A Closer Look

The Luxon, in this case, is blue with silver highlighting. The other colours are black and grey, both of which have the silver highlighting. The Luxon isn’t designed to blend in but to stand out. The shiny outside gets covered with fingerprints very quickly, so the supplied cloth will come in very useful…

The Luxon is made of aluminium, which not only makes it light but it also means that heat is transferred very well from hard disc to the outside world; meaning that your data is safer and your HDD will last longer.

On the front of the Luxon, there are labels to the sockets on the side where you plug all of the cables in. The product styling has definitely been thought out well, and a lot of attention has gone into the way that the final design looks like.

To get inside the enclosure, you have to pull the inner silver piece out from the blue outer ‘envelope’. Whilst this isn’t a problem, the screeching sound of cold aluminium against cold aluminium is awful; imagine some scratching their nails down a blackboard, but much MUCH worse… :)

Once recovered from the noise, you can see that the inside is laid out well too. There is a small sticker on the base of the unit explained where you have to put the supplied jumper. This is so that the enclosure knows which type of HDD you have installed; whether it be SATA or IDE.

Vizo have kindly also supplied a stand with rubber inserts to make it possible to stand the product up.

When the Luxon is turned on, the top glows blue and when there is information being read, it flashes purple. Its a nice touch to an already good looking product.

Fitting

The hard disc went in easily, but I did find that it was easier to attach all of the cables and then put the hard drive in place than installed the hard drive; then trying to connect all of the cables in place.

The hard disc is then screwed to the inner silver portion of the Luxon. The hexagonal screws, that the supplied screw driver is used for, are for screwing the outer blue bit to the inner silve bit where the HDD is. This means that no-one can open it, without the special screwdriver.

Testing

I used Sandra’s HDD benchmarking tool to see how fast the drives where when used outside of the case.

You can connect the Luxon to your PC via USB or SATA whether you are using a SATA HDD or not. This means that an IDE HDD can run over SATA. I ran an IDE and a SATA drive in the Luxon, which were both made by Western Digital, and I ran the tests over both SATA and USB2.

Here are the results:

	Internal mb/s	Luxon via SATA mb/s	Luxon via USB mb/s
IDE	40	13	23
SATA	51	12	27

When using SATA the speed seems to top out at 13mb/s where obviously the SATA connection is limiting the max possible transfer rate, and not the HDD itself. USB 2 seemed to be the faster method of connecting to your PC. I also found that the SATA connection would only work if I restarted my PC with the Luxon connected. This is contrary to the claim saying that SATA is hot-swappable. However, this might be due to the fact that my mobo does not have the hot-swappable function. When I removed the Luxon from my computer when it was connected via SATA it would lock up and not respond.

SATA HDD’s are faster it would seem in this test which is what we expect. However, USB 2’s full bandwidth (60mb/s) isn’t really used by the Luxon.

Conclusion

Any harddrive put into the Luxon is going to perform at half of its normal standard, which isn’t bad by any means but it would have been nice to see less of a performance drop. However, the Luxon is stylish enough to carry anywhere and overall it’s a well polished product.

Pros	Cons
Great product design	Horrible screeching sound when installing
Multiple interface options	Not groundbreaking performance
Cools HDD	SATA connection needs work