When it comes to computer hardware retailers, most of the big online sites have a "house brand" or carry an affiliate company's products. For Tiger Direct, it's Ultra Products, for Geeks.com it's Genica. And for those of you familiar with shopping at NewEgg, you've undoubtedly heard of Rosewill. There are literally hundreds of products sold through the Egg under the Rosewill brand and compared to pricing on some of the name brand products, the Rosewill gear is usually quite inexpensive. But do these house brands have the same quality as traditional 3rd party manufacturers? In many cases these products are actually built by the same companies, and simply rebranded and sold under the affiliate name.


Today I'll be looking at an external hard drive enclosure from Rosewill, the RX353-S BLK model. This is the second such drive enclosure I have reviewed from Rosewill, the last one being the RX81US-HT-35A-BLK. This is a SATA drive enclosure that offers both USB 2.0 and the latest eSATA interfaces. The aluminum case accepts any single 3½" SATA drive, either SATA150 or 300, with support for NCQ and up to 1TB of capacity. With the USB 2.0 connection, transfer rates of up to 60MB/s are possible and 300MB/s with eSATA, depending on the drive used. The enclosure is universal, and works across Mac, Linux or any version of Windows since 2000.

Let's take a look at the setup.