External hard drive & enclosure

sm0241 · 28 Aug 2006 at 04:32

I've just relocated to Australia and rather than build a PC right now I've decided the best thing is to buy an external hard drive to use with my work laptop. I'm still on this forum so I thought I'd post here anyway to get some advice and see what people are using.
I've had a look around the net in Oz and have seen some products from Vantec, Coolermaster and Welland. I don't really see the point in buying one with ext. SATA capability, USB would be good enough for me.
The packaged products can be up to twice the price so that's why I've decided to buy the enclosure and hard drive seperately (may not be the same case in the UK).
I will probably go with a Seagate/Samsung HDD for the enclosure as they've always served me well over the years.
Thanks

Borden · 28 Aug 2006 at 08:20

Don't bother spending the extra for a SATA drive to put in the enclosure. The only real benefit is that the cables are tidier but seeing as the cable's inside the enclosure then just go for an IDE drive. The Seagate 7200.10's have been getting very good reviews all over the net so i would look at those over the other drives.

The other benefit of an IDE drive is that IDE enclosures cost less than SATA enclosures. Having had no experience with external enclosures i can only suggest that you have a look at some reviews on the net. The Icy Box enclosures seem very popular and the Akasa's have had good reviews as well.

Rambaud · 28 Aug 2006 at 08:25

I have 2 IcyBox hard drive enclosures -one is SATA and one is IDE.

The SATA enclosure is easier for changing the hard drive - it just slides in/out. But it has only USB2/SATA connectors, whereas the IDE has Firewire and USB2.

sm0241 · 30 Aug 2006 at 04:42

A lot of the SATA stuff is cheaper than it's IDE equivalent down here, not sure if this is the same back in the UK now as it's a while since I looked.
On the other hand the SATA enclosures are more expensive so it's sort of catch 22.
The Vantec Nexstar is a nice enclosure, one of my mates in the office has one and it's the USB2.0/eSATA version although he is just using it with his laptop.

deadeyedic30 · 1 Sep 2006 at 15:16

I have one of these:
Enermax External Enclosure EB305C IDE/SATA to USB2.0 - Black
My only issue with it is that the sata cable for connecting a sata hard drive is not the most flexible of cables, currently have an 80Gb pata drive in it. Very good for document back ups and storing converted movie files.