Introduction

It took a while for the external enclosure manufacturers to catch up with the motherboard makers. USB 3.0 however was introduced a while ago. Sadly at CeBIT 2010, we saw mainly prototypes, meaning they were not production ready. Sunbeamtech was the first specialist to send us a full blown USB3.0 3.5inch external enclosure branded under the Airbox name. External data backup via USB has always been painfully slow, surely compared to the more expensive Firewire and eSATA solutions. Will this USB3.0 external solution be able to close the gap ? Let us see if we can stuff it with precious data at blistering speeds.

About Sunbeamtech:
Sunbeamtech Company was founded in 2000 and specialized in the development of cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFL). Expanding our business to provide the computer DIY (Do It Yourself) market with stylish, fancy and high performing products. Sunbeamtech's mission is to satisfy computer DIYers all over the world who are tired of boring designs when it comes to computer hardware and who want exiting revolutionary products. The Company has grown to provide an extensive line of products to suit the desires of its customer.

The research & development team, which is located in Taipei, Taiwan, constantly strives to develop innovative, unique, and high performance products.

The Airbox USB 3.0 3.5"



The Icon specs on the box tell it all :

Interface : USB3.0 (backwards compatible)

Supports USB Hot Plug Feature

Supports up to 2TB drives

Compact design for easy portability

For maximum cooling performance : aluminum housing with 8cm LED Fan



Some pictures of this black beauty:



The tray slides out after removing 2 tiny screws (screwdriver is supplied!). The tray is made of some heavy duty plastic, yet very lightweight.



Electronics on close up. The eagle yes among you might have spotted that the connectors are detached. We took the pictures just before doing the thermal test. So we disconnected the fan and LED plugs.



Clean, simple tray solution. Note the Big acryl on the front. This will lighten up with a Blue LED if the HD's has any activity



On the back side you find the on/off button, DC plug in, the USB 3.0 cable connector and the FAN LED button



The 80mm fan pulls in cold air, allows it to flow around the installed HD and heated air is expelled via tiny holes in the rear



Close up of the 80mm fan. You can clearly spot the 4 LEDS, which can be turned off via the FAN LED button. Also all the wires are hot glued so there's almost no risk of a wire detaching itself during transport.



The USB 3.0 Cable and the DC unit. Especially the latter is very compact and a good step away from the notebook alike power supplies we usually get with external enclosures

Test Setup

Time to put the Enclosure to the test. Motherboard of preference was an Asus Rampage Extreme III. Powered by an Intel I7 i950 and 6Gb of Corsair Rams. The USB 3.0 ports being steered by the onboard NEC 720200F1 chip (as used on most motherboards ). Comparison was made between the Sunbeamtech enclosure hooked up to the USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports. Last test was when we attached the Western Digital 1.5Tb drive straight to the internal Intel ICH 10 SATA controller.

Leeghoofd's Test Setup
CPU	Intel I7 i950
Cooling	Corsair H50
Mainboard	Asus Rampage Extreme III 0704 bios
Memory	6Gb Corsair PC12800 Dominators at 1600mh 8-8-8-24
PSU	OCZ ModStream 700W
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The Intel I7 i950 CPU was run at stock speeds : 3060Mhz with 3200Mhz NB speeds. Rams run at 16000mhz C8-8-8-24 1T

Hard drive used in the enclosure was a S-ATA Western Digital 1.5Tb Caviar Green (64MB Cache)

Operating system is Windows 7 Professional 64bit, Videocard driver for the GTX 285 is the WHQL 179.45 64bit version

Performance Tests

HDtune is a hard disk utility with many functions. It can be used to measure the drive's performance, scan for errors, check the health status (S.M.A.R.T.), and securely erase all data and much more.



USB 3.0 isn't only brilliant on paper, it performs alike. USB 2.0 is better put to rest. Let's hope the new standard will be 2 x USB 2.0 ports and the rest all USB 3.0. The Sunbeamtech Airbox allowing blistering speeds up to ICH 10 standards. Only the Burst rate is a little bit inferior.



PCMark05 got its own separate HD suite benchmark. Testing a wide variety of factors to determine the performance of your hardware setup. Similar picture here, though the numbers don't look as impressive as with HDtune. Yet in the File write test and Virus scan USB 2.0 is completed obliterated. Sunbeamtech's USB 3.0 solution again able to compete with the same Drive attached up to the ICH.



All these numbers look astonishing. But does it allow the end user to gain massive time when leeching or stuffing his external hard drive with LAN Party goodies ? We simulated copying a various number of small rar files, bigger VOB and ISO files. Just like you would do in real life. Total amount of data to be moved was 33.5GB. Write get's a nice gain , but look at them Read speeds. More than two times as fast.



Megabytes per second are nice, but let's take a look how long it took to shift all the data. Read again being the most impressive. With almost 11 mins gain when transferring the files from the external enclosure to the PC's HD. It took just over 17 mins to get the files Read with USB2.0. Write gains over 7 minutes compared to the USB2.0 25 minutes copy time.


Since the Airbox got an 8CM FAN build in time to see how big its effect is on HD operating temps.



We unhooked the FAN connectors and put a thermal sensor on the Western Digital Hard drive. Temps being monitored via Asus' Probe. After an hour of HD stressing we saw a 7°C difference, which is very nice. Conclusion: The little 8cm fan is very effective to keep your mechanical drive in safer operating temperatures.

Conclusive Thoughts

There you have it. How could I best describe this Airbox. Of course it's personal taste but I find it a very stylish solution. Besides its shear elegance it also performs at blistering speeds. Naturally you need the USB 3.0 option provided by your motherboard or add on card. I've tested this external enclosure on several brand and types of motherboards ( P55, X58, AMD870-880 and 890 chipsets ) and it worked in fabulous harmony with the NEC USB 3.0 chip.

Secondly the thermal aspects are not gimmicks. The 8cm cooler is a very efficient solution, which puts all the other efforts of miniscule fans solutions to shame. Being inaudible and able to adequately cool down your hard drive makes this Airbox ideal for long term endurance data transfer. For those that want some *bling* LED solution is a real jawbreaker, for those that don't fancy it, the LED button gives you what you want.

The compact design claim for portability is discussable, as the unit itself is pretty big. But the power supply unit is tiny, compared to the notebook alike solutions of the competition. No extra power cables, it has about the same size of a normal Nokia charger.



And the best has yet to come. Retailing under 30 euros you get a lot speed for the buck. Wading through zillions of online shops the competitors’ solutions retail at at least 45 euros. Only drawback is that Sunbeamtech needs to get solid ground in Europe. Maybe this Airbox can help them to achieve that and more e-tailers will start to list this nice product.

Sunbeamtech Air Box USB 3.0 Recommended for



Pros
+ Very fast external USB3.0 3 1/2" HD enclosure
+ Effective cooling solution
+ Very low price
+ Small power supply unit

Contras
- Availibility



A big thank you goes out to Terrence from Sunbeamtech for providing us the review sample and allowing us to test the USB 3.0 capability on a wide variety of motherboards.