Inside The Luxon

The Luxon is made up of a central plastic hard drive compartment and an aluminium U-shaped cover.

The cover is locked in place by four screws, two on each side. To make it easy for newbies, Vizo even provides a mini screwdriver with the Luxon.

To access the hard drive compartment, just remove all four screws and slide the cover away. The fit is actually tight enough to prevent the cover from moving much, even with the screws removed.

Inside, you will see that the compartment is mostly empty. There is a small PCB at the top (which is really the rear end of the enclosure. Let's take a closer look.

Drive Controller

The JMicron JM20338 chip

The Luxon uses the JMicron JM20338 controller chip. It is the same chip used in the Thermaltake A2396 HDD enclosure. It boasts the following features :

• Serial ATA 1.0 compliant
• Automatic Serial ATA 3.0/1.5 Gbps speed negotiation
• ATA/ATAPI PIO mode 0 to 4
• ATA/ATAPI Ultra DMA of transfer rate 16.7, 25, 33, 48, 66, 100, 133, and 150MB/s
• ATA/ATAPI LBA48 addressing mode associated with 2-byte sector count
• Support Serial ATA hot-plug
• Ultra low power consumption
• Work for both AC and DC couple between the transmitter and the receiver
• Provide specified OOB signal detection and transmission
• Support Spread Spectrum Clocking to reduce EMI
• Support 20MHz, 25MHz, 30MHz or 40MHz Reference Clock
• Support Partial/Slumber power management
• Provide adjustable TX signal amplitude and pre-emphasis level
• Master/Slave support
• OS support : Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows ME, 2000, XP, 2003, Media Center, and later, Mac OS 9.22 and above

Internal Connectors

On the PCB, there are a few connectors. In the first picture below, you can see an empty white 4-pin power socket. If you are using a SATA hard drive, the Luxon comes with a SATA adaptor that connects to the 4-pin power socket and the SATA data socket seen at the upper right corner of the red box in the picture below.

Power & SATA connectors	IDE connector

If you intend to connect an IDE hard drive instead, the Luxon comes with an adaptor that converts the small four-pin connector into a full-sized Molex power connector. The header for the IDE interface is seen in the second picture. The Luxon uses a very short IDE cable to connect that to the hard drive.

IDE-PATA Selection

Unfortunately, the Luxon is not smart enough to automatically detect whether a SATA or IDE hard drive is in use. You will need to use a jumper to tell the Luxon whether you are using a SATA or IDE hard drive.

Vizo pasted a sticker with the jumper options on the base of the hard drive compartment for easy reference. You will need to use the jumper to connect the J2 pins for IDE hard drives, while connecting the J3 pins for SATA hard drives.

You can see the two sets of pins in the picture. The J2 pins are located just to the left of the IDE header, while the J2 pins can be seen at the upper right corner of the picture.

For some odd reason, Vizo did not include a jumper with the Luxon. It is very likely to be a packaging mix-up since the Luxon cannot function without the jumper covering either the J2 or J3 pins.

LED Light

The LED light can be seen on the upper side of the compartment. It shines directly to a translucent piece of plastic which transmits its light to the outside of the enclosure.

It glows blue when the Luxon is turned on, but changes colour to purple and flashes when there is read or write activity.

While this may seem to be a frivolous detail, the LED light is actually important. It tells you when there is read or write activity so you do not disconnect or turn off the enclosure which may result in data corruption.

Of course, it is safer to use the Windows XP option of safely disconnecting the hardware before actually turning off the Luxon or disconnecting it. That ensures that cached data is completely written to the hard drive before you turn it off or disconnect it.