In Win Ammo 2.5-inch RFID External Hard Drive Enclosure Review

Installation & Testing

Getting the drive installed is pretty easy. Once you have the back of the drive off you slide out the rubber housing and place your 2.5-inch hard drive inside connecting it to the SATA connector on the PCB. I decided to use the Kingston SSDNow V-Series 128GB hard drive we recently reviewed. Using a SSD with this type of enclosure really is not recommended because you are not taking advantage of the drive since your speeds are limited to the USB port. Once you have your drive installed go ahead and slide the rubber housing back in the enclosure and reattach the back.



In Win Ammo 2.5-inch RFID External Hard Drive Enclosure In Win Ammo 2.5-inch RFID External Hard Drive Enclosure

Next just plug in the drive and you are ready to go. Once you turn on the drive you should hear 3 beeps. Once you hear those go ahead and take the 2 RFID tags (the dog tag and red keychain) and press them next to the RFID indicator on the top of the drive to initialize them. Once each RFID tag is initialized it can be used with the drive. The LED indicator will be red when the drive is locked and when you unlock it with one of the tags it will be green.


In Win Ammo 2.5-inch RFID External Hard Drive Enclosure In Win Ammo 2.5-inch RFID External Hard Drive Enclosure

When you plug the drive in for the first time and you do not hear any beeps it is probably because the drive you are installing already has a partition on it. To get the RFID to work you need to go into disk management in windows and completely delete the partition. The go ahead and unplug the drive and plug it back in. Then when the drive powers back up it should beep 3 times telling you to initialize the RFID tags.

To test the enclosure’s transfer speed I ran the HDTune and Sandra’s Physical disk benchmark. Like I said normally we would not be using an SSD as you can see from the results it is limited by the USB speed.


In Win Ammo 2.5-inch RFID External Hard Drive Enclosure In Win Ammo 2.5-inch RFID External Hard Drive Enclosure

The enclosure’s transfer speeds are good, not the best, but still good.

Final Thoughts

It’s great to see In Win doing something a little different with external drive enclosures. They could have just made a plain hard drive enclosure, but they decided to go with the Ammo theme and I worked out very well. Just like I’ve said many times in this review the enclosure looks like an ammunition clip from a gun! Also In Win really did a good job with the inside of the enclosure too. The rubber not only makes things easy it also provides great protection.

The RFID is something new that I haven’t seen on an external hard drive enclosure before. It provides true hardware data protection. You can only access the drive if you first unlock it with one of the RFID tags. It was also nice for In Win to provide 2 RFID tags, small things like these are easy to lose so good thing you have 2!

The Ammo enclosure sells for around $35 online, which is a bit more expensive than other 2.5-inch enclosure’s, but those also do not offer RFID technology. Overall ThinkComputers gives the In Win Ammo 2.5-inch RFID External Hard Drive Enclosure a 9 out of 10 score.

rating9 10 small

Pros:

– Awesome design inside and out
– Easy Installation
– RFID technology

Cons:

– Drive needs to be fresh (non-partitioned) at first to enable RFID

[ad#review1042-bottom]

About Author