I hate external drive enclosures!

[oolon]

What I hate about external driver enclosers is power bricks, because the voltages on different power brings can be different however the connectors are all the same. I just made the mistake of plugging the wrong brick into one and now the hard drive as released the "smoke of life". Anyway this is not a data recovery story as I previously imaged the drive and was going to check it for bad sectors. I guess It has one big one now!

My question is does anyone know of any external 3 1/2 drive enclosures with built in power supplies (ie no brick), usb2 is fine, a fan is even better. I have a nice 5 1/4 one with built in power, but I thinking the 3 1/2 form factor is to small for them try to build it in.

[jimbouk]

I just made the mistake of plugging the wrong brick into one and now the hard drive as released the "smoke of life".

Ah the good old 'pop and poof' of I've blown something up. I had reversed a molex to get 5V to a case fan, forgot about it when my case was open and plugged it into a DVD drive

My question is does anyone know of any external 3 1/2 drive enclosures with built in power supplies (ie no brick), usb2 is fine, a fan is even better. I have a nice 5 1/4 one with built in power, but I thinking the 3 1/2 form factor is to small for them try to build it in.

5 1/4 inch one with a cage to hold a hard drive? I like the laptop ones that power from usb, would they do one that powers from 2xusb or is firewire an option?

[kingpotnoodle]

Personally I like the 1.8" drives ones, although I think my 80GB one has taken a few too many whacks :-(

The 2.5" USB powered ones are surely the best option... after all you can carry several for the same weight as a 3.5" disk and the bottleneck is USB2.0 anyway.

Of course 2.5" eSATA or USB 3.0 is a different matter...