Silverstone MS05 2.5" Enclosure

Silverstone MS05 Enclosure

Manufacturer: Silverstone
UK Price (as reviewed): £22.33 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): $45.99 (excl. Tax)

Just the other week, we looked at Silverstone’s Treasure TS01B enclosure, which sports RFID tagging to protect your data. Today, we’re going from that extreme to another as we look at Silverstone’s MS05 enclosure, which is targeted more at the no-nonsense end of the market. This is an enclosure for people who don’t care about looks that much, they just want something that works – an enclosure that reeks of functionality, with style as an afterthought.

That is probably why the MS05 looks like a shrunk-down photon torpedo or a scale model of a space shuttle in Buck Rogers. It could also be a Cylon mobile phone.

The TSO1B, Silverstone’s other recent HDD enclosure, and the MS05 have two things in common though despite the exterior differences. First and foremost, they both need a proper name as it’s quite annoying to call them both by their model numbers – model numbers don’t tend to work that well if Silverstone is trying to break into a wider market. Secondly, it has a single unique feature that it has been almost completely designed around, in this case it’s a docking station. We’ll get to that in a minute.

The MS05 is larger than the TS01B to a significant degree. While the TS01B was a diminutive 80 x 130 x 10mm (WxHxD), the MS05 is much thicker and bulkier at 85 x 160 x 15mm (WxHxD). While that difference may not seem like much in terms of the numbers, it actually makes a fair bit of difference when you actually carry the enclosure and there’s no denying that the MS05 is heavy when compared to other enclosures.


Looks-wise, the MS05 is quite stylish and has the same shiny and brushed finish as many other the TS01B. Unlike the TS01B though, the MS05’s casing has a distinctive purple stripe at the end and portions of which flash when the drive is in use. Or when you have an incoming phone call from a fellow Cylon…

The other end of the enclosure is where the ports are located – eSATA, mini-USB and a 5V DC socket. The enclosure came with all the required cables too, which is nice, but there’s no leather wipe-clean wallet or tools supplied, as you might get from other higher-end products.

On the plus side though, the mounting method for the MS05 is pretty secure and robust when compared to other enclosures we’ve seen in our time. The MS05 uses a secure housing system, with a tray that slides out of the chassis. The drive is then placed on the tray and four small screws are used to bind the two together before the tray is replaced in the enclosure itself and fastened in with another two screws.



Ok, so it isn’t exactly rocket science and the fact that the screws really are very tiny does limit the usefulness somewhat, but the system at least offers a fraction more piece of mind than the really cheap drive enclosures out there.

The main hook of the MS05 though, if such things as hard drive enclosures can have a hook, is that it comes with a docking station that you can mount in the front of your PC if you have a spare 3.5” bay. Then, rather than fiddling with cables, you can just slot the drive straight into the front of the PC and get to your data straight away. This frees you to just leave the relevant cables in your laptop bag and forego the faff of untangling wires.

The docking station itself doesn’t look all that fancy, but having a fiddle with it revealed that Silverstone had at least put a little bit of thought into the design and shaped the enclosure so that you can only slide the enclosure in the right way round, ensuring the ports in the dock line up with the sockets on the drive. One push and you’re done.

The fit around the enclosure is also very smooth and tight, meaning that once the enclosure is in then you’re unlikely to shift it out by accident. The rails inside the drive are also made of plastic rather than metal, so you aren’t going to damage that shiny finish through repeated use.