Akasa Noir Max 2.5″ Hard Drive Enclosure Review

Final ThoughtsThis Noir Max first and foremost, certainly looks good, it has a streak of professional and class about it. While this is not exactly essential it certainly sets us off on the right track. There were however a few problems with the basic design. The Akasa logo on top is on a separate bit of metal that has a bit of play in it and as such rattles slightly. The screws on either end are very fiddly, and trying to get the hard drive casing out is very fiddly and requires some persuasion. Unfortunately, they decided to go with a silicon casing for the hard drive, which while a very sensible idea to cut down on noise and vibration, it does make it very hard to get it out of the enclosure. I also found the silicon casing to be very thin and too weak to cope with the slight stretching you need to get it over even the smaller 9.5mm sized hard drives.

While there were a few faults that could of been avoided, there are lots of things I like about this device. The performance is well, as good as it gets, we were using an OCZ Vertex EX Series SSD and while the quoted read and write figures were a little higher than our tests, that is however always to be expected. The akasa noir max was certainly not slowing the drive down, or at least noticeably. On top of that, with a mechanical drive installed the noise is very much reduced mostly thanks to the silicon casing.

As you would probably expect this device turns any 2.5″ hard drive into a easy to use plug and play device. Unfortunately, Akasa didn’t think that you would want to change the hard drive, so they have designed it with that in mind, and while you can easily remove the hard drive and switch it, you won’t be able to fit a 9.5mm drive in after using a 12.5mm (due to the rubber stickers) and chances are the silicon casing won’t take the wear and tear of bending once more – mine certainly didn’t.

At a price of £18.21 on Amazon.co.uk or around $38 from LangtonInfo.com it makes this device incredible value for money especially as the faults I picked up on are fairly small compared to the advantages of having such a fast performing device.

Pros:

• Allows you to use any sized 2.5″ drive
• Give extra capacity for your computer
• Easy plug and play
• Very portable size, with case
• Good performance

Cons:

• Fiddly to change drives
• Device has a few design flaws
• Silicon hard drive casing too thin and will rip