3. A Look Inside

To use the external box you must first install a 3.5 inch hard disk, which is not included. Obviously, to do this you have to open up the HD-3510. The interior appears very similar to a normal USB box for IDE hard disks; the decoder card, which is located on the other side, is one of very few differences.

For the test we used a 40 GB Fujitsu disk that we had formatted earlier with Windows XP. The installation proved to be very simple: we just connected the hard disk with the IDE and power cables, and secured it with the screws.

We saw various components on the decoder card, and several memory chips, each with 64 Mbit of storage capacity. All together, we counted 192 Mbit of memory, which are used for the caching of data. We did not examine the actual decoder chip (Sigma Design Chipset E), because it is located under a passive cooling element that we did not want to break off.

The 3.5 inch IDE hard disk goes there

Fits like a glove

The decoder card takes up very little space in the box

The integrated test disk's sequential reading is more than impressive