External enclosures?

[Adcadet]

Hey Guys,
Does anybody have an external enclosure for a 3.5" drive (or multiple) that they like? I'm thinking that it would be convenient to turn one of my older hard drives into an external drive connectible by USB3 (+/- eSATA). It looks like many of the enclosures out there are really cheap, which is great if they also work well.

 

[Mercutio]

The biggest weakness with 3.5" single drive enclosures is the crummy power brick. Antec makes a really nice single drive eSATA enclosure, but I don't want to pay what Antec charges for it.

This is the one I've been buying.

 

[Howell]

I have a Fantom Drive that I like but I'm not sure they come diskless. Personally, I would wait until you could get one with USB 3.

 

[Adcadet]

OK, USB 3 is here and my PC is equipped. Anybody have an external enclosure that doesn't suck? I'd love something with USB 3, USB 2, eSATA, Firewire, gigabit ethernet, and Wifi-N, but I'd settle for just decent USB2/3.

 

[LunarMist]

I have a USB 3 toaster, which is probably not what you want.

 

[Adcadet]

Yeah, not interested in a toaster.

I'm debating what I should be doing for backups. I' have a little <1 TB, but that amount is growing quickly as I've started to shoot some video. I'm debating between a cloud service and a home-built system. Right now my main data drive, which includes my wife's data, is a 2 TB drive. I have a second 2 TB drive in a hot swap bay that I plan to simply dump everthing to and remove from the system and put on a shelf when not actually running a backup.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm really down on single-disk external enclosures for 3.5" drives. I don't think they do enough to protect the disk and they all seem to have crummy power supplies, which put together equals regular moments of terror regarding the status of the disk inside. I think the hot-swap bay + shelf is a better plan all around.

 

[CityK]

External enclosures are so hit-or-miss its not funny. Damn cheap controllers are buggy as sin.

I did have success with 2.5' Iomega eGOs I got from Dell on sale last year (sorry, I forget the drive and controller combo ... but they were cute as buttons!) and ended up giving them to some people and they have been happy with them since. They were 2.0 based, so I guess Dell was clearing house/stock to make way for 3.0 inventory. Anyway, no idea how the new 3.0 controller models (which are considerably more $) perform, or, to the point in your case, whether they use the same in their 3.5' Form Factor. Which, in summary, as I realize now, means I haven't really contributed much here...moving along now :rabbit:

 

[mubs]

OK, USB 3 is here and my PC is equipped. Anybody have an external enclosure that doesn't suck? I'd love something with USB 3, USB 2, eSATA, Firewire, gigabit ethernet, and Wifi-N, but I'd settle for just decent USB2/3.

You're easy to please, aren't you? :-D

 

[Stereodude]

I'd love something with USB 3, USB 2, eSATA, Firewire, gigabit ethernet, and Wifi-N, but I'd settle for just decent USB2/3.

What, you're not interested in SAS, Fiber Channel, InfiniBand, or PCIe? :cherry:

 

[LunarMist]

Maybe you want a Thunderbolt device?

 

[Adcadet]

Spare hot swap tray: $9: http://cmstore.coolermaster-usa.com/product_info.php?products_id=627
Maybe I will do hot swap to shelf trick.

 

[Bozo]

One of these from Antec? About $30.00.

 

[LunarMist]

That link is to the general site. Is it the Antec device that is basically a 5.25" internal toaster turned sideways, with the ass-end of the drive sticking out during operation?

 

[Bozo]

That link is to the general site. Is it the Antec device that is basically a 5.25" internal toaster turned sideways, with the ass-end of the drive sticking out during operation?

Yep. When I click the link it goes directly to the Easy SATA page.
I have about a dozen of these installed. I even modified one to be a permanent install.

 

[LunarMist]

You may have some cookies that I don't or be using a different bowser.

 

[Adcadet]

My main PC is in a Coolermaster Haf-X, so I could get a third hot swap tray (the one in the link above) and rotate backup hard drives in/out to run the "backup to my shelf" approach that Merc seemed to like.