To install the disk drive it is recommended to unscrew the screws on the side where the connectors are. Here from left to right you see the power led, eSATA, USB and power connectors.

When we’ve opened up the enclosure we can see the connector circuit board. It features a SATA and SATA power connector to click onto your disk drive quick and easy. Then it’s time to get the drive into the enclosure and tighten the screws.

Remember, all 2.5 inch drives works in this enclosure. I used a normal disk drive in the review, but you can use one of the newer SSD drives and both make the enclosure dead silent and make it run cooler.

After the installation it’s time to hook it up to the computer. As said before, if you go with the eSATA cable, connect both the eSATA and the USB -> power cables. If you’re going with USB, just use the USB(A) x2 -> USB(mini-B) connector.

When the enclosure is powered the powerled gets a nice bright blue glow. There is no power switch on this enclosure, so to turn it off you need to pull the powerplug. Be careful though, make sure that your motherboard can handle SATA hotswap. If you’re using USB it should be ok, as long as you don’t transfer data while disconnecting.





To make sure that we don’t loose too much performance we’re testing the enclosure to see that it can handle the pressure and give us the speed we expect to get.



As you can see the speed is almost the same as with Vizo Luxon Advanced that we’ve tested earlier, with the same disk drive. The Élite enclosure is slightly faster in the read access time and a little more powerful with the transfers.

Conclusion
Finally I would just like to say that this is a great enclosure, with a stylish design like no other on the market. It was a pleasure to test this product and it really is a difference to the old 3.5 inch portable enclosures.

With more and more information today travelling to and from work, between friends and the all smaller disk drives that comes out, in just a few years probably everyone will have a 2.5 inch disk drive in their pocket, maybe with a version of the Élite enclosure from Akasa and just maybe in more colours than black?

What about a pink version? Or green, blue, orange, red? We’ll see what the future holds ;)

Last I would like to thank Caterina for sending out the product sample from Akasa.