Buy.com has some very positive reviews on (what appears to be) this same enclosure, except for IDE drives. I’m having difficulty finding much on the SATA enclosures, but whatever I look for it all seems to be >$20, so this seems like a nice deal.
In for 2. One for my backup-desiring girlfriend and one for the future.
Does this support SATA/300 or just SATA/150?
Edit:
Buy.com says it’s SATA/150, but that’s alright seeing as how it’s limited by the USB bandwidth anyway.
I think if you read very carefully, there is only a single USB external connection. The SATA connection is internal. So this is a standard USB 2.0 external drive enclosure which interfaces an internal SATA hard drive. In other words, it does not interface with the older parallel interface drives. But it is still a very good deal - I bought 3.
Interface/Port:
1 x USB 2.0 External (1 x Serial ATA Internal)
You all might want to read up on these, maybe on Wikipedia. This may not be what you want or expect.
I have about 50 external enclosures, some from back in the day when they were $100 or more.
The internal of this enclosure takes a SATA drive, and NOT the old style ATA you may be thinking of.
It takes that disk and through circuitry converts the the connection to USB, so you can connect a plain old USB cable to it.
The USB connection is way slower than a eSATA connection (eSATA is the designation for an external connection, similar to how one uses USB cables).
The trade off in loss of speed with a USB connection is that 1) the USB connection works on any PC with a USB port; and 2) it is “hot swappable” meaning that you can plug and unplug the drive while your computer is running.
eSATA cables/devices are not how swappable. You have to power down the PC, connect the drive then turn the computer back on. Hassle. But in return for this hassle you get faster transfer speeds.
The downside of these is that there is no fan. This limits the speed and size of hard drive you can use, 500GB or less you should be OK.
If you do use this, make sure that it is in a well ventilated area so it does not fail due to overheating. And don’t lay it on its side and stack stuff on top of it. These get very hot.
Without a fan these are “air cooled” so you need as much air circulating as possible.
Because these are for full sized hard drives (and not the 2.5 notebook sized disks/enclosures) these are NOT good for travel. They are portable, but not really. They are BIG and also require the BIG power adapter to work (I assume you know that a USB port has less than 5 volts going through it).
The concept of these is that you can move them around, computer to computer, but more importantly, you are not limited to the one or two hard disk bays on your PC.
Keep in mind that on eBay, for example, there are sellers practically giving these enclosures away when you buy one of their hard drives.
Nowadays, because hard disks will soon be outdated technology (taken over by Blu-Ray and SSD), you can get a 500GB eSATA or ATA hard disk for less than $100, with enclosure!
So I’d say this is a good deal ONLY if you have an extra hard disk sitting on a shelf.
Just my 22 cents.
Also, be careful with these. There’s a tendency to put all your stuff on one drive since they are huge (actually, I have about four 500GB drives filled).
But you best backup your critical info on more than one drive. For example, I have My Documents on every drive, which totals about 30GB on each, of the same info.
I do this because if a drive ever fails (it does happen) you don’t want EVERYTHING lost because you had all your info on a single drive.
Just a tip.
I know. I just like woot. 
In layman’s terms: You can remove the drive while the power to the chassis is on. If you had more than one “sled” (that the drive is mounted to before it slides into the chassis) you could switch drives as needed without having to unplug the USB cable, turn off the chassis, change drives, turn it back on and then replug the USB cable back in.
Obviously /ANY/ USB device is hot-swappable since you don’t need to shut down the computer before changing devices.
Hope this helps.
Hello. New poster here.
I have to ask…what is a hard drive enclosure for anyways?
To keep you hard drive portected? To keep it cool? To help it run on AC power? Is this a necessity for someone who is using an external hard drive (like a WD My Passport)?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Maybe because a person has a boatload of PATA drives sitting around not earning their keep?
If I already have a hundred VHS tapes, a blu-ray player won’t let me watch them.
I have one of those, same thing, different company name printed on it. Really nice for repair work, you’re right. Wouldn’t want to use it as a permanent solution though.
These devices are generally less expensive than the “all in one” external enclosures and allows one to remove the drive and replace it with another one. A company called ICY DOCK has the same kind of product with no fan. I own them and they work perfectly fine. Since I deal with large files most of the time, I’ll pick up 3 of these since the price is more than reasonable. The 680 GB WD would be an excellent contender for this as it runs very cool and is low priced.
Link to the HD
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136218
I’d go for it if it was firewire. I’m about to scrap out an older PC I have that will free up a sata 150 drive. Ah well Guess I’ll wait till I actually DO scrap it out. Probably pick up a Sata to firewire/E-sata housing almost as cheap if I watch for sales.
It seems like everyone is asking the same questions:
-No, your DVD will not work. It’s almost two inches wider than the case and the case does not have an open front for the DVD tray.
-Yes, your 2TB drive should work fine (and yes, they are available).
-No, PATA is not supported, but most drives sold in the last four years are SATA. At this point, if you want a new enclosure with PATA support, its getting to be a specialty product.
-No, SATA/300 is not supported. However, SATA/300 drives will work in SATA/150 enclosures like this one. And speed wise, it doesn’t matter since the transfer speed will be limited by the USB cable.
Your USB transfer speeds will be determined significantly by the speed of your CPU and the speed of your USB chipset. On my relatively recent system, I got the following transfer speeds:
Older internal sata: 68MB/s
Newer internal sata: 110MB/s
New external sata via usb: 28MB/s
SATA/150 maxes out at 150MB/s and USB maxes out at 60MB/s. If your system is super fast, then you might get 60MB/s from this drive.
In practice, due to write-caching and other performance tricks used by the OS, my external drive doesn’t “feel” anymore sluggish than the internal drives.
Found a review for a similar model. In for 2 tested using a 750 GB HD and that is what I have. Been looking for a good External HD cage the last few days.
Umm… USB is 5 volts. 3.5" HDDs have 5 and 12 volt lines.
I have the feeling the other person didn’t truly answer your question. This product would allow you to take a hard drive that may usually be an internal drive in your computer, and use it as a usb drive. This is very similar to your WD drive, however, it does not come with a hard drive, you would have to obtain that separately.
For example, I recently had a Western Digital external drive “quit” on me. Turns out, it was just the power supply. I was able to purchase a product like this one, put the hard drive from the Western Digital enclosure into this, and not lose any data.
This is not something you need if all of the hard drives you own are powered and hooked up to your computer. IF you should have an old computer lying around and would like to use the hard drive as additional storage, you MAY be able to use this. It depends on the type of hard drive, it should be SATA to use this (as opposed to IDE or some of the others listed in the discussions.)
I hope this answers your question.
To clear things up, an external hard drive is an internal hard drive that is inside of an enclosure (like this one) instead of being mounted inside the computer.
The WD My Passport, for example, includes a 2.5" enclosure and a 2.5" hard drive that have already been assembled.
Your Hard Drive will f@il prematurely if not cooled by a fan. I would never risk an expensive Hard Drive or valuable data in an uncooled device.
I seem to recall that Google has been tracking the deaths of its hard drives, and they found that the drives running a little hot lasted longer than those cooled excessively. Of course, it was only up until a POINT where the heat kept them limber … beyond that point, DEATH. You may want to ask Google the specifics … though I doubt they will indulge you.
Personally, I use two aluminum encloses for my 320 and 640. I do not leave them on all the time … regardless, the drives seem to be working just fine.