USB 2.0 are the best, but there are lots of cheap hard drive cases out there that aren’t any good.
Yes, I am not talking about the hard drive itself. That is easy to find out which one is best. They are the same used on laptops and any reputable famous-name brand will do.
But the interface+case. What are the good ones?
There is a huge amount of them in all sizes and prices.
I tried 3 before finding a good one.
Mind you - I travel a lot and they go under much much much stress, wear and tear, banging inside the travel bag, continous defragmenting, etc.
BILLIONTON - no good. It was a little more expensive than the others, so I thought it was better, but I was wrong. It broke after 2 months and 2 trips. Maybe it was just -that- particular one that I purchased, but… well… r.i.p.
PSEUDO-SONY - no good. There is written VAIO on top, but it is not a real Sony product. Many colors, but the case is so thin that it would probably bend (melt?) in a typical Taiwan summer while you are defragmenting your hd… ouch! It got so banged up while in the travel bag that I couldn’t even put the hd in without pushing… no good… a fluke!
ASUS - good. Now there are many Asuses out there (here comes a joke), but this one was in a brown box with yellowish borders… Well, so far so good - 3 months and it is still working.
Now wouldn’t a good BBS admin make this post -STICKY- so that people can add their own reviews?
is there any troubles with these… like for instance remember with certain SCSI external hard drives… if you powered them off before shutting down the machine… the FAT would become corrupt(or some problem) and your harddrive’s data wouldnt be much good… like i know with usb you are suppose to disconnect the drive from that lil icon first… wondering if you had any problems like that… seems like a usb 2.0 would be handy when your case is at full capicty of hard drives
depnds what model of thinkpad… post your m/t and i can help you out…(should be on the same sticker as serial # ie. 2350-***) someone prolly told you about ultrabay hdd’s… if you have a recent model, usb 2.0 will prolly be your best option(unless you use the usb port for something else a lot) since connecting ultrabay anything to anything else then a thinkpad is a pain in the ass…
I am returning to Taiwan in April, and I recently ordered a USB 2.0 HD for backups and storage of my DVDs and music (all legally purchased, mind). I went with this model, which has received good reviews. If you use a Mac, make sure that you do not get a model using the Oxford bridges; if you do get such a model, make sure that its firmware and your OS are up to date BEFORE placing any data on it.
The OP mentioned laptop drives, so the model I ordered may be too large to his/her uses.
They have an X drive II 30 gigs at the computer market for about 6300NT.
X drive pro same thing but 7500NT and can play MP3’s
Mainly used for transferring most memory cards and can act as a hard drive. Good to take on vacations and outings so you don’t run out of space on your camera.
My (new) external drive works great on my desktop, put won’t connet through my USB cardbus on my laptop. (Meither will anything else, eg my floppy drive!). The drivers are right, the buscard is being found (XP pings when I put it in).
[quote=“tonygo”]My (new) external drive works great on my desktop, put won’t connet through my USB cardbus on my laptop. (Meither will anything else, eg my floppy drive!). The drivers are right, the buscard is being found (XP pings when I put it in).
Anyone got any ideas?[/quote]
Ideas about why it isn’t working? Or ideas on what to do instead?
For the former, I’d guess the laptop can’t provide enough wattage to power the drive. (I assume the drive doesn’t have a separate external power connector.)
It’s probably the power, Tongyo. I have 2 USB2 drive cases stuck to my laptop. One is stuck directly into the USB plug, and the other to a USB hub which has its own power plug. I used to try it on a USB hub without a power plug and the PC would complain that there wasn’t enough power.
Once the disk is in the case I don’t plan on taking it out. The cases are all quite flimsy looking anyway so repeated wear and tear is probably bad for them. It was interesting though that I asked my 3C shop to install the hard disk into the case for me and they rejected the first, more expensive case that I’d bought.
I forgot once and switched the power off to the USB hub. My PC was on at the time, but all my data’s still on the hard disk.
I picked up one of the cases, named “Metal Gear Box Substance”. It is a “stylish” case, although I don’t think it looks all that great. This particular model is supposed to work with both USB2.0 and SATA.
Physically, it is made of two reasonably sturdy, approximately rectangular, aluminum plates held apart by four cylindrical acrylic spacers at each corner. Thumbscrews attach the plates to the cylinders. A steel mesh screen runs around three sides, purportedly to allow airflow. The fourth side (one of the short ones) has the electronics and connectors. This enclosure uses a separate power brick, which connects into a PS/2 connector (the type usually used by keyboards and rodents). A rocker switch by the connector turns power on and off.
Forgot to mention: the drive sits loose inside the enclosure. The space is a little larger than a 3.5" drive needs, so it does slide around a little. There is no active cooling; it’s convection only, which is the purpose of the mesh sides.
I haven’t tried other HD units with which to compare it. However, it doesn’t work as I would have expected. Win2K only recognizes it if Windows Explorer is open; if not, the drive isn’t recognized (noticed) when it is plugged in. In addition, it took several hours of Googling to figure out who really made it, and even then they didn’t have a driver for Win2K for this particular model (Win2K doesn’t notice it at all until a driver is installed, not even to the “found new hardware” point). I had to use the driver for a similar model (one with USB2.0 only) and hope it would work – which it more or less does.
Finally, it may have other problems. When moving files off an old drive I had put in it, I got errors saying that the data was corrupted. It’s possible that the drive already had been, but I had not noticed any problems before. Now, I am concerned that it may have screwed up the drive as I moved stuff off.
Also wanted to add: my experience has been with flash-card type “drives”, which have worked every time, and are recognized immediately upon being plugged in. That, s what I had expected, but that is not the case with this HD enclosure.
For a proper review, I would have to have tried other enclosures to see if any of them are better; but my experience with this one leads me to say that I would not recommend it, period. The manufacturer lacks professionalism in not having put Win2K drivers on the driver CD that came with it (only drivers for Win9X and Mac). The instructions are pathetic, and absolutely nowhere on the box is there any indication of who made the thing – it took serious searching to find them.
Strange, neither of my two USB2 enclosures have any space for ventilation, and the drives within don’t slide around, either (I didn’t install them myself though - I get the shop to do it). Both were recognised by WinXP. I’ve also used a USB2 flash drive and that was recognisable too.
When I was using Win98 and 1 enclosure I did need a driver for the enclosure. I added the 2nd enclosure to a WinXP machine. It wouldn’t recognise it at first but that was because the drive inside was brand new and hadn’t been formatted. Once I’d done that and rebooted it was fine. Either way Winexplorer didn’t need to be open. If the power goes off and then comes back on WinXP re-recognises the drive.
Earlier posts have mentioned that Win2000 is like WinXP…in which case you wouldn’t have a problem. It looks like it’s the enclosure itself.
To add to my comments above on the “Metal Gear Box Substance” garbage, it turns out that the piece of crap was defective, and some of the files I transferred with it were corrupted as they were being transferred – they were fine on the old drive before the transfer. Fortunately, I didn’t lose anything essential (I only moved some music and other junk), although it was all stuff I wanted to keep.
It’s possible that these enclosures work perfectly well most of the time and I just happened to get a lemon. However, considering that all of the ones I’ve seen – I mean every USB enclosure by anyone, not just the “Metal Gear Box Substance” – were no-brand garbage, with whoever imported it maybe (or not) slapping a sticker on the box, and all made in China (which is of course well-known for its extremely high-quality electronics manufacturing industry ), I wouldn’t recommend storing anything critical on drives in these enclosures. You never know what your data is going to look like after getting strained through that USB cable.
I’ve been using a USB2.0 HD enclosure + Western Digital 120GB HD 8mb cache. No problems.
I bought the enclosure at Guanghua. Sorry dont know the name of the place right now. If people are really interested, just post a reply asking and I’ll dig up the card somewhere.
The enclosure is an all aluminum casing with a fan on the back. The HD slides right in. I did poke holes out of the plastic front plate to allow better air flow. Made it look sweet as well in my opinion. The front plate has a grill like appearance, I just made it for real by cutting out the plastic grill slots.
No name brand. Made by Galileo. I think they do OEM work for someone. I’ve bought 3 of these. 2 as gifts for some friends back in the states. One came with a logo of someone on it. Funny that. Box is baby blue. Cost about $1400.
3.5" Enclosure
High Quality Aluminum Case
I power down the laptop without disconnecting all the time. I do stop it if I take it out before powering down. I then flip the off switch (yes this case has one) and disconnect it from the power strip as I noticed that current was still going thru. (tingling sensation when you put your hand on the case even tho power switch is off but still connected to a/c)
I bought a 2.5" HDD a while back that draws power from the USB, and have had no real probs with it. The lady in 3C put it together for me, and it looked like a pretty simple operation. All I had to do was run the driver for my Win98 machine. I subsequently used it with my new XP laptop and it was recognised straight away. The drive itself was IBM.
Last night I bought an 80Gb 3.5" drive, and an enclosure with separate power supply. Assembled it all myself - 10 minute job - and plugged it in to the XP laptop. The computer recognised it was there, but reported an error during installation and that was pretty much the end of that. I buggered around with it for hours, to no avail.
I tried the drive manufacturer’s website ‘Seagate, made in Singapore’, and they were adamant that no driver is req’d. I did download their ‘drive installer’ program and run it to no avail. I also tried plugging it into my gf’s machine to see if I had inadvertantly screwed something up on mine. It recognised the drive, but was unable to format it or do anything more. In both cases I get the same error from the device manager telling me that the drive is unable to start.
The advice from the troubleshooting thingy is always to uninstall the driver and start again, which I have tried with no success. I’ve also tried using the CD that comes with the enclosure, but it only has drivers for Win98. I’m lost, fed up, and want my mummy.
Did you FDISK the bloody thing Strag? I had that problem with my 120GB WD drive. Laptop wouldn’t let me FDISk the thing via USB. I had to bring it to work and format the ugly (read: using other words at that time of frustration) thing here at the office.
If you buy a HD from guanghua typically it’s blank and needs to be FDISK )make the partition(s). Then you can format it and it’s off to the races. Just a thought.
Once booted, click start and then right click on my compter. You should then get an option called manage or disk management. Click on that.
This should then list all avaialble drives including your new one. Select it then right click, and take the option to create new partition. Follow the screen prompts, once finished and formatted it should be available for use.
), I wouldn’t recommend storing anything critical on drives in these enclosures. You never know what your data is going to look like after getting strained through that USB cable.