Hard Drive Enclosure

[crazyfool]

hey guys,
I think my current western digital drive is about to die because I get long pauses during use of it in vista where there is no disc access and then after what can range from seconds to minutes everything carries on as it was, sometimes after hearing a rather strange sound coming from the drive. So i am goin to get a new one but as this drive is only a few months old i am hoping western digital will replace it with a new one so I would like to use it as an extrenal drive and therefore which enclosure do you think is best. All i really need from it is esata because it is the fastest and is supported by my motherboard and maybe some cooling. Any ideas?

[SSK]

something like this:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=817279

no image of it tho...but i think it looks like this:

http://img.misco.co.uk/images/upload...0606095654.jpg

[crazyfool]

Just realised most esata enclosures require a power supply and my sockets are kinda already overloaded ... so would a usb enclosure powered by usb be much slower than an esata drive... the drive would only be used for running fedora linux and any dvd or music played would be from another drive...

[!TIMMY!]

USB 2.0 Speed - 480mbps (irrc)
eSata Speed - 1.5/3 gbps

I have the Icybox IB-390St-US-B Black 3.5" SATA HDD with USB +eSATA ext caddy and it works well for me, has both eSata and USB.

You can't power a 3.5" drive from the USB, only a 2.5".

[TheReaFireblade]

I have the Icybox IB-390St-US-B Black 3.5" SATA HDD with USB +eSATA ext caddy and it works well for me, has both eSata and USB.

External enclosures don't come much better than either IcyBox +/or (my personal favourites these days) AC Ryan's 'AluBox'

I use AC Ryan's 2.5" eSATA + AluBox Kit for Notebooks (ACR-HD52995. eSATA ExpressCard34 + SATA II AluBox) with my Dell XPS M1730
And their 3.5" and 5.25" (IDE or SATA. USB 2.0/eSATA) enclosures with my PC's

[peterb]

If you want to fit your own drive into an enclosure, Aikasa make a neat one - it takes IDE or SATA drives - and has USB and ESATA (if you use a SATA drive) connections.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=616032 (Available in Blacjk and blue too!)

[crazyfool]

thanks for the help but would a usb connection for the drive be noticeably slower then an esata connection?

[peterb]

It is noticebly skower, but not excessivley so. Certainly not a problem for transferting the odd file - but you would notice a difference if you were transfering a gigabytes. However the bottlenecks are more likely to be in reading and processing the file system rather than the data stream transfer.

(As it happens, I have just had occasion to transfer a 1.3Gb disk image to a hard drive over a USB 2 link. On three separate occasions, I got speeds of 1.2, 3 and 4.9Mb/s. The difference in speeds was down to what the processopr was doing, rather than maxing out the link. Esata would almost certainly have been faster.)