Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 109
 An excellent external hard drive enclosure with dual IDE and SATA to USB interfaces November 9, 2008
J. Chien (Pearland, TX United States)
56 out of 57 found this review helpful
This enclosure is solidly built, finely finished, with good fit for 3.5" internal hard drives of various brands, and easily to assemble. It offers IDE or SATA to USB 2.0 interfaces. The blue colored part is an aluminum case that helps dissipate the drive heat without cooling fan noises (the remainder gray parts are plastic). There are three popular colors in matte finish to choose from: red, blue, and black. The vertical stand is attached to the enclosure by a groove and two screws for added stability. The blue indicator light is an approximate match to the blue color of the enclosure case.
I used a Seagate IDE 250GB and a Hitachi SATA 500GB in the enclosure for the trials. Windows XP and Windows Vista readily recognized the assembled external hard drives. They were shown as USB devices with their respective hard drive product numbers and not the identity of the enclosure chipset. This could be important as some hard drive's proprietary software, such as Seagate DiscWizard, require the presence of the branded hard drive in order to be run. The data transfer was reliable, whether the file size was 2MB (photo files) or 49GB (a backup file). The data transfer rates were normal if not a little faster compared to my other external hard drives. The drives never got hot, just slightly warm during the data transfer or after being left on overnight.
I am particular about the position of the power switch. I do not buy any enclosure which power switch is jammed in between the power cable and the USB cable. This enclosure has the power switch conveniently located above the cables.
The tray that houses the hard drive is plastic, preventing the hard drive from making direct contact with the aluminum case for more effective heat dissipation. The side panel with the circuit board and internal connectors is screwed to the plastic hard drive tray, making frequent drive changes a risk of unthreading the screw holes.
Overall I am fond of this external hard drive enclosure, for its nice design and finish, dual internal hard drive interfaces, aluminum case, and reliable data transfer. I am using the Hitachi SATA 500GB in this enclosure permanently. I have also acquired a red for a 640GB SATA.
The best cheap drive enclosure February 28, 2009
alaska (New York, NY USA)
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
I tried this with both an old PATA/IDE and a new SATA drive; both worked flawlessly. The IDE drive required a jumper setting to "Master"; no jumpers were required for the SATA (WD Caviar). The printed manual is a lot better than what one usually sees with this type of product, but not as complete as the documentation on the included CD-ROM.
pros: very quiet, fanless, good build quality for the price, nice stand. Looks better than most enclosures.
cons: IDE connector is mounted on the PCB board, so you have to be a bit careful. The blue light is rather glaring.
Runs cool and quiet, works great! February 25, 2009
Jo Gusto (Santa Cruz, CA USA)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Not much to say except 5 stars! Love the way it works with both SATA and PATA drives. Shoved a SATA 750GB Seagate drive in, and it runs like a champ. It's not going to be as fast as eSATA, but at this price, it's a winner for things like backing up your data, or as a huge "thumb drive" you can carry around (or grab-and-go in case of earthquake, fire, or flood).
Beautiful September 21, 2009
Chris Christenson (Merritt Island, Fl USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is hooked up to a mac mini as a time machine drive and it is working very nice. Installation was fairly easy, be careful not to bend the thin metal sleeve that come off. The light isn't too bright but is definitely noticeable.
Excellent Product February 12, 2010
S. Gottschalk (USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I purchased this HD enclosure for two reasons. The first was to easily access and wipe the contents of IDE hard drives that had come out of a computer which had died and was about to be rebuilt with a motherboard that only included SATA HD connections, as is often the case with the latest technology. The second reason was to take the obsolete IDE with the highest capacity and use that as an external hard drive for backups, file transfers, etc.
The Samba did everything I asked of it without issue. Installing and uninstalling IDE drives was a piece of cake, albeit a little more time consuming than attachments designed to be temporary in nature. The instructions were easy to follow and installation was not complicated. The only nits I had with it was that the IDE connector is part of the PC board which could lead to breakage if you're not careful in lining up the hard drive with the connector, and there was not a lot of room for tucking away the unused SATA cables and connectors.
I used the enclosure with 3 different IDE hard drives. One was an IBM Deskstar 80GB, one was a Maxtor 120GB and one was a Maxtor 300GB. Each was recognized instantly as an external HD device by my primary system, which uses Windows XP (SP3) as the OS. I was then able to work with the hard drives as though they were just another drive in my system.
Wiping the files meant several hours of access, sometimes without a break, for each of the hard drives. With no fan in the Samba, I was interested to see whether heat would be an issue. While the Maxtors in particular did cause the enclosure to get fairly warm after a half hour or more of constant access, the temperature never raised beyond that point and never became warm enough to cause problems with the hard drive's behavior. I had read elsewhere that the old Maxtors tend to get hotter than other drives, but the Samba handled them just fine.
None of my nits were enough to knock a star off my rating for this enclosure. It was well priced, quiet (thanks to not having a fan), easy to use, easy to cart around, looks nice, and performed flawlessly. I'm delighted with it.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 109
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