Tuesday 6 September 2011

Hard Drive Enclosure


Bought this enclosure to use an 80GB Sata HDD that I replaced. The port works fine, and as far as I can tell, temperature is not terrible. The product did not include, however, the small screws that are supposed to go into the top of the mount. Without these, the HDD can just slide out of the aluminum casing. It is not a show stopper, since a piece of electrical tape works just fine, it is just that the product should come with everything needed to use it properly. You get what you pay for... 2.5" USB 2.0 SATA Hard Drive HDD Case Enclosure

I bought this enclosure to recover data from a laptop. Installation is easy. The interface adapter from the old laptop hard drive has to be removed before connecting to the circuit board. I was able to copy the data from the hard drive once the enclosure was plugged in. There was no attempt to mount the hard drive on the enclosure with the two small screws. Will this enclosure last? I have no idea and it doesn't matter. All I know is that I paid $7.80 for this enclosure and it worked well enough to recover data from a dead laptop. The product gets a five star rating for a data recovery job accomplished.

I bought two of these to upgrade two different laptops to SSD and use their original drive as an external.

Both Enclosures failed miserably. I tried the onboard usb 2.0 ports on 6 different laptops and 2 different (core 2 and core i5) desktops and although it recognizes the drive you can't format or use the drive in the enclosure. Even a quick format fails. This is on 3 different 2.5" drives tested. Also tried using a Vantec USB 3.0 Powered Hub and Asus NEC USB 3.0 card, didn't make any difference.



Looking at the cable system I decided to flip the usb cable around, using the 2 sided end on the drive, and it works! Drive is recognized, formats, and can write to the drive. So if you are having troubles, connect the end with the two cables to the drive, then connect the short cable to a usb port and reach the long cable length around back to another usb port.

Made with an all metal construction that could easily short out the hard drive. In addition to that it has a terrible non-mini usb slot on the enclosure and the usb cable doesn't even fit in it because it's made so poorly. All this and when I finally force the cable in and plug it into my computer it dosn't recognize that there is even a drive plugged in. I have never had this problem with any of the other enclosures i've bought. Save yourself the trouble and invest an extra $5 to get a working one.

I bought this item after my laptop bit the dust. My wife and I had several hundred pictures, songs, etc. that we had not backed up. I didn't want to pay for a professional recovery service, so I did a bit of research and decided to give this product a try. I was able to connect it to my old HDD (which was only readable after a trip to the freezer) and recover most of the data we had lost (not all of it, but most). For the price, I don't think I could've done better. Oh yeah, I will be backing up frequently from now on.

Works as advertised. Used a Toshiba 110gb laptop drive from a "dead" machine. No problem getting the drive installed but there were NO instructions included at all. One must remove any drive carriage from the drive itself or it won't fit. 4 screws took off the Toshiba drive carriage and then the drive fit right in. No noise or vibration and the speed is good. It works on our ASUS laptop with Win7 and a desktop with WinXP. Haven't even needed the 2nd USB power plug on the included Y connector.

This is a seriously cheap piece of hardware. For a one-time recovery of a hard-drive from a fried laptop this unit is an excellent choice. The hard-drive in question had both an xp (ntfs) and linux (ext3) partitions. There was no problem accessing either partition - they pop-up on screen as a reqular USB device in both xp and linux.'


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