For the purpose of this review I will be installing the In win Ammo laptop hard drive external enclosure with the following system.

• CPU - AMD Phenom II 955
• Cpu Cooling - Core Contact Freezer
• Motherboard - Gigabyte MA790XT UD4P
• GFX Card - XFX GTS250
• Sound - Xfi Xtreme Music
• Memory - 4GB OCZ Platinum
• Disks - 2x WD 320GB in Raid 0
• Optical - Aopen DVDRW
• Case - Thermaltake Element T
• PSU - Nexus NX-5000 R3
• On Review - In Win Ammo

To test the In win Ammo laptop hard drive enclosure I will be fitting a Seagate Momentus 80GB 5400rpm Sata hard drive into it then set up the RFID and run a little application called HD Tune to find the data transfer speed, access time and data burst rate of the drive.

Fitting the drive into the In Win Ammo was a pretty straight forward affair, if a little unconventional. You might be a little surprised to find out the drive is actually fitted into a rubber surround and isn’t actually screwed to ANYTHING. The inner mounting basically slides into the Ammo and is held in place by “fins”, for lack of a better description. This is then held in place by the rear panel.

None of the insides are physically attached to the outer case. I guess this is how the Ammo passes the 2m drop test as the insides can move around a bit under big drops therefore the impact on the drive is greatly lessened. A superb, yet relatively simple, solution in my opinion.

Drive fitted into its inner protective sleeve.

Once the drive was fitted into the external enclosure I plugged it in and it powered up, with a few beeps, and the power indicator, which is where I expected it to be on the rear lit up blue and the RFID flashed red to signify the drive was locked by the RFID or something along those lines or to signify it was an unformatted drive.

Upto this point the Ammo was not visible in windows so I had to wave both RFID Keys over the RFID sensor which unlocked the drive and I was able to format as per a normal drive. This is something you will have to do only when you first setup this with a new Hard drive, you have to create a partition and format to get the RFID running, just simply plugging in already used HDD will mean the RFID is disabled.

Once it had finished formatting it was time to test it out.

Comparing it with other laptop drive caddies I have looked at the Ammo seems to be a little quicker on the transfer rate though this maybe down to different drives / computers but on the whole it’s pretty much spot on what I was expecting.

That’s pretty much it for the testing, in use it seems nice and stable, in the past I have encountered the occasional drop out when using laptop drive external enclosures which required a powered USB hub or external power supply to eradicate but in the short time I have been using the Ammo it’s never dropped out once. Again this could be down to different hardware being used to test it.

Next Page - Conclusion