Vizo Masterpanel Review
Introduction
I want to start off by thanking Vizo for sending me this. Vizo sent me this, along with a couple other parts that I will be reviewing over the next couple of days. The Masterpanel is designed to allow you hook up an internal drive to the outside of your computer.
It supports IDE, SATA, and E-SATA drives.
In the Box
The Masterpanel came in a nice box, instead of those annoying plastic
containers that normally require something like a hacksaw to open. Inside the
box, there is the Masterpanel, a SATA cable, and a power cable. There is also a
manual.
The manual is decent, and tells you what you need to know, but it is
translated rather poorly.
Installation
Installing the Masterpanel is a piece of cake. It screws into a normal 5.25
drive bay, uses a floppy drive power connector, and needs 3 SATA ports.
Thats
right, it will take up 3 SATA ports if you want to use IDE, SATA, and E-SATA. If
you want, you can connect only the ones that you want. Right now, I have it set
up just to run the IDE port, since I have no SATA drives.
Remember, you must make sure that the drives you hook up are set up as Master, since they won't work otherwise.
To install a drive, all you have to do is plug in the included power cable to masterpanel, connect it to your drive, and then connect your drive to the panel with either an IDE cable, or an SATA cable.
In Use
It works as advertised. I was able to hook up an IDE drive to it, and access
it without any
major issues. It also appears to work as fast as a normal
internal drive, which makes sense seeing as it is running an internal interface
to the outside of the case.
Once it is all set up, it works just like an internal drive, and shows up as one to Windows.
Interestingly enough, it also acts as a SATA to IDE converter.
Now, there were a couple of minor issues.
First and foremost, it doesn't support hot-swapping for SATA and IDE drives.
I am fairly
sure that E-SATA hot-swapping would work, but I didn't have a E-SATA
drive available for testing. I wouldn't have even mentioned this, but according
to the product information, it supports hot-swapping. Everytime I tried it, it
did one of two things. It either crashed my computer, or reset my computer.
What it comes down to, is that you have to turn the computer off, plug in the drive, power on the device, and turn back on the computer. It still saves time compared to actually installing the drive into your computer.
The other issue was that I had some problems getting to work on K8T Neo motherboard. It was more of an issue with my SATA controller, since I have had problems getting anything SATA to work in my computer.
Conclusion
If you are like me, when you first saw the Masterpanel, something along the lines of "what will I do with this?" went through your mind. It turns out that it is quite useful, especially if you work on computers for a living, and need to be able to quickly test drives, backup data before formats, and things like that.
Discuss this review here: http://www.furytech.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=893
Official site: www.vizo.com.tw
| Pros | Cons |
| Useful Saves time installing drives Supports SATA, IDE, and E-SATA |
Takes up 3 SATA ports Not Hot-swappable Poor Manual |