I have bought 3 external hard drive enclosures recently and they all suck.. Poor quality, craftmanship etc.. There are so many freakin enclosures out there.. Can someone recomend a durable decent enclosure I'm sick of wasting my money? I don't want lights or strobes or any of that shit, I just want a decent one at a decent price.. HELP...

 

im in the same boat too. which ones did you buy that sucked?

i am leaning toward the adaptec aluminum enclosure $39.99 from best buy.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=1099392683637

but then again best buy has a WD 120GB external drive $123.50 - $50 rebate = $73.50

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=1093467859961

i might just get the WD

 

I've tried 3 from Newegg around the $20-$30 mark and hate them all.. The more expensive ones have lights and all kinds of junk.. I'm hoping to find a decent one that's more durable then the plastic poorly made ones I've been getting.. I've spent over $100 on junk..

 

jonesi, have they been failing on you?

 

I always recommend this one in what seem to be our weekly "i need an external hard drive!" threads.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817145345

 

Not failing but I hate putting $100+ hard drives in these pieces of crap.. I'd rather be safe and get a decent enclosure.. I have like 80+ gigs (mp3s) of full albums that I like to backup and keep safe.. Plus friends like to borrow the hard drives..

 

I've heard good things about these:

http://www.techimo.com/articles/i82.html


I have a 'mad dog' brand case that I got at best buy. Its not very good at dissipating heat, but it hasn't caused me any problems yet. I've had my 250 gb ftp running on a drive in this case for months with no problems.

 

I bought the adaptec external hard drive enclosure. I love this thing, it came with a USB Y cable and a nice leather pouch. I installed a 100GB seagate notebook drive. So now I have a 100GB Pocket Drive. And yes it's that small it'll fit in your pocket.

I bought the 2.5" drive enclosure:

USB 2.0 2.5" Enclosure



But they do make 3.5" enclosures as well.:

USB 2.0 3.5" Enclosure
USB 2.0/Firewire 3.5" Enclosure

 

Get the ones with the lights.. they look cool...

 

I would suggest against any type of external hard drive. I never had much luck with them in the past. If a mouse farts while the drive is spinning you get a head crash and the possibility of damage and dataloss. there are plenty of removable drives out there, but you'll have to pay.

 

I'm sorry, but this sounds like a very rare occurance. I have never heard of this ever happening. And with the sheer number of external drives on the market, if this were a severe problem You wouldn't see so many external drives being sold on the market.

 

Plus people use their drives differently. IIRC slyraskal takes his back and forth to work most every day while I just plug mine in occasinally, backup to it, and then put it back on the shelf.

 

Yup, I hook mine up at work, leave it plugged in for 8 hrs, unplug it, go home, hook it up to my home computer and go through this everyday and for the last few months haven't had any issues with it at all. I've even hooked it up to my wife's laptop and co-workers computers to transfer files with no problems.

The only problem I did have with it once was that I plugged in the secondary socket instead of the primary to the computer and the drive started beeping at me. But that was my mistake and not the drive/enclosure. The secondary socket is used only for power, not data transfer. You would use it in settings where the hard drive you bought needs extra power because it isn't a low power consumption device. This is why I went with the Seagate drive that I did, because it's a low power drive, and I'll never need to use the secondary socket, thereby not taking up 2 USB ports.