Inateck FE2005 Review 2.5-inch USB 3.0 External Drive Enclosure with UASP

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

The Inateck FE2005 USB 3.0 2.5″ drive enclosure is super easy to use and can be found at a very reasonable price of $16.99 on the web and is really geared toward using SSD drives with the speedy interface. It’s very easy to set up with the drive sliding right in and being plug and play. Probably the most complicated part is ensuring that UASP is enabled and working to maximize performance. The hard plastic design makes it durable, though not indestructible, but it shouldn’t have any issues handling the day to day rigors of an external drive.

With the JMicron JMS567 chip inside, the same that we saw with the FE2006 enclosure, we expected performance to be a bit better than we saw. Our OCZ Vector 180 drive connected to a SATA III port hit nearly 500MB/s reads and almost 520MB/s writes. While in the enclosure connected to USB 3.0, we saw reads topping out just below 400MB/s and writes getting near 450MB/s. We’d expect to see both reads and writes performing at around the 450MB/s level which we did see with the FE2006 model. We tried using a different SSD, cable, updating BIOS, and even tried running on a different system but all came back with similar results. We did validate that the FE20006 still performed at peak levels on the test bench so we ruled out any issues with our setup. Inateck did state that “results may vary on the PCBA that (a) different manufacturer designed” so it may be that this is the extent of performance we can expect out of this very enclosure but others may perform closer to expectations. Certainly not a deal breaker as performance is still very good and there are a number of other enclosures out there that don’t match this performance though competition is growing.

All in all, if I were to purchase the Inateck FE2005 2.5″ USB 3.0 External Drive Enclosure on my own dime, I’d still be pleased with its performance – especially given the low price. It’s very versatile and makes it easy to swap drives in and out in seconds. I was even able to hook it right up to an Xbox One and use it as an external drive with no problem where it definitely sped up load times even though UASP is not being employed (for now, at least). On that note, I definitely recommend using an SSD with this enclosure to get the most out of it. HDDs can also be dicey as an external drive as they are much more sensitive to physical shock due to the fragile moving parts within. With SSD prices ever dropping, anyone can easily spend about $100 between the enclosure and a 240GB SSD and have a very fast external drive.

Legit Bottom Line: For external storage enclosure that uses a speedy USB 3.0 interface while leveraging UASP and priced at a level that anyone can afford, Inateck has a very solid solution with their FE2005 model enclosure.