Here is a summary of our first impressions on Patriot Convoy XL hard disk drive enclosure.

Strong Points

• Excellent material and top-notch quality.
• Interesting DIP-switch configuration for RAID level.
• Very easy HDD/SSD installation: no tools or cables are required for installing the drives inside the box, and you don’t need to disassemble the box to install the drives. In fact this is the HDD enclosure with the easiest HDD/SDD installation we’ve seen to date.

Weak Points

• Misleading information on box (“Works only as an external drive on NVIDIA platform”), which can make users think that this unit can only work as an external drive with NVIDIA-based motherboards, which isn’t true. According to Patriot this will be corrected on the next production batch.
• Patriot could give more information on compatibility, like a list of compatible motherboards.
• Targeted to solid state drives (SSD’s), which are not mainstream yet.
• Incompatible with some motherboards.
• Can't be used as a boot device, only for data storage.