ESATA/USB Drive Enclosures/Adapters

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Will Rickards

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Are there any good ESATA/USB Drive Enclosures/adaptors?
I remember a thread where we were trying to find the best one around.
I looked at those ones that you put the hard drive in the top and there seems to be plenty of bad reviews of them as cheap junk.

I have two needs
1) for my laptop at work. I need more external storage for my laptop and want to take a 1TB or bigger drive and hook it up. This one can be an enclosure as the drive won't move. But it has to be pretty quiet as it will be on my desk.
2) For my workbench at home. Sometimes I need to hook-up a drive to my computer for diagnosis. I'd like something like those hard drive docks here as most of the time it won't have anything in it. Maybe just one of those universal adapters would do here. But I keep reading stories of the drives being fried by the power supplies on those.
 
There certainly is a lot of total crap sold in this market segment.

For #1 I have an AMS venus enclosure that has a fan but whole box is quiet and decent quality.

For #2 I have a Easy Go USB drive adapter cable (no enclosure) that I like. Easy to connect to drives still in computers without taking them out.

Both are PATA. SATA is a whole other game.
 
I use a Thermaltaco Black X for the temporary SATA drives. It works fine with 3.5 and 2.5" drives, though some will run quite warm. The base has good weight to it, unlike some other flimsy docks that slide around.
 
The Antec is quite bulky and suffers from the common rear switch/cables design. I prefer the switch to be in the front and cables in the rear.

I use a compact 4-drive external enclosure for the fixed drives.
 
I genuinely don't believe there's such a thing as a good generic external enclosure. I have a couple Vantec top-loading SATA enclosures that I use, and several of the bare drive units like the one ddrueding linked, but USB enclosures are pretty much eternally frustrating.
 
The antec looks nice. I guess tapping power from the power supply would work for the other.

The black X was the one I read some bad things about.
There are certainly a lot of good reviews.
But the few bad reviews seem to indicate it killed their drive.
That makes me nervous about it.
 
Will Rickards said:
...
But the few bad reviews seem to indicate it killed their drive.
That makes me nervous about it.
Click to expand...

There are plenty of ways to kill a drive using these enclosures, but nearly all of them involve user error. Pulling the drive too fast, formatting the wrong drive, etc.

I wouldn't worry about that so much, so long as you are careful.
 
I've used over a dozen drives of all sorts in the Black X without any problems. The power brick is connected to a UPS of course.
 
CougTek said:
For #1, the Antec MX-1 is supposed to be pretty good. I read good reviews about it, but I've never had the opportunity to try one myself.
Click to expand...

I have one of these with a Samsung 750GB in it and it works very well for me. It's quiet (subjective of course) and the performance seems fine with eSATA. I have no real complaints other than it is bulky. It sits on my desk so it really isn't an issue.
 
Well I found my laptop (Dell D630) doesn't support ESATA or expresscard. And there really is no point getting a cardbus ESATA adaptor. I wish they'd let us spec out our own laptops at work. So instead of an external (ie MX-1) I just ordered a 500GB 7200 RPM drive to put in it. Running my VMs which take the most of my space, like 50GB per VM, on a separate spindle was nice but not convenient for when I take the laptop home.
 
Odd that the D630 doesn't include an ExpressCard slot; my D830 has one in addition to a Cardbus slot.

Anyway, the modular bay (optical drive) has an option for an 80GB HD. Maybe get one of those and swap in your big drive. I haven't used that particular accessory; I use the bay to house a second battery.
 
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