Installation and Performance
Now that we know what the Blizzard have to offer in the way of features it’s time to put it to the test and install an actual HDD into the enclosure. The process is just as simple as advertise on the packaging. With the Cooling fan removed, all you need is a standard 3.5” SATA HDD. After lining up the drives connections to the enclosures it is as simple as sliding the drive in and reattaching the cooling fan.
The enclosure is entirely plug-n-play so there is no software to install and once your HDD is powered and connected you are ready to go. Transfer rates over a USB 3.0 SuperSpeed connection are pretty much as fast as a SATA6 connection and during our testing we tried to do just about everything you could ask of a drive from multiple small file transfers to large single file transfers and even some movie watching and gaming. None of these actions even came close to pushing the drives temperature very high and while it’s rare to see large temperature fluctuations in hard drives these days the usual 5oC range was reduced to 2-3oC with the drive in the enclosure.
