Nikoichi HDD Enclosure
Anyone shooting with a dSLR these days has PC storage problems. Especially when you are shooting in camera RAW file format. The motherboard in my custom PC only allows two hard drives on a standard IDE/ATA cable. The internal 250GB slave drive fills up in no time so I use external hard drives connected via USB 2.0 ports for file archiving.
I just found that Century’s Nikoichi Box (available at Storage Studio, SimLim Square) can accommodate two hard drives in a single box using a single power adapter and a single USB 2.0 cable. Currently, the best value in hard drives in Singapore are the 250GB drives (IDE or SATAII) which cost about S$0.76/GB S$0.54/GB. The price of the Nikoichi box and two of the Hitachi Deskstar 250GB drives comes out to S$585 (US$350) S$445 (US$280). The Nikoichi box allows you configure the 0.5TB as a single big drive or separate drives. Be careful using two drives in the single drive mode because if one drive fails you loose everything.
Century is a Japanese company. However, the Nikoichi box is made in China and comes with instructions in Japanese and Chinese only. Even if you are an English-only dude like me, step-up is a snap because of clear and accurate diagrams. Construction (brushed aluminum) is excellent with design mimicking the cheese grater vent holes made popular by Apple’s Power Mac G5. A small blue LED behind the grating in the lower left corner flickers when drive is accessed. Both design and performance of the Nikoichi enclosure are similar to Macpower’s Pleiades Ice Cube (USB-FX). Storage Studio claims the Nikoichi is faster than the Ice Cube. On my machine, they are both the same… screaming fast!
Robert’s Rating: 
Note: The price to configure a Nikoichi box with two Hitachi Deskstar 500GB drives is S$1,425 (US$854) S$577 (US$263) .
Hey Rob, I’m looking to buy this from SS as I might be getting a MacBook Pro, moving away from my PC. So with all my drives (I do photography and shoot in RAW often too), this is probably what I need. Any problems so far?
Hello Eugene:
No problems whatsoever. I have mine configured with two 250GB drives in the separate mode. I just turn it on, run my backup, then turn it off.
Beware that this enclosure will not work with the new Seagate 7200.10 drives. I own a pair of them and neither one will work in this case.
I have got one of these drives, but threw out the instructions a while ago.
i just bought a 2nd 500GB drive to put in and want to know how to run the drive in separate drive mode.
you guys say its easy to do, so please spill the beans as there is no info about this drive on the net in english.
thx.
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