USB 2.0 drive enclusures for Slug with FF

[sansp00]

Well, Im back from slug hell … Like for many other things, Murphy’s law stroke again.
Just to put everybody in the context:
I run 2 (a main & a backup) Unslung NSLU2 (unslung to a flash drive) with a HDD hooked up to each (320Gig and 250Gig) to run backups, FF and Twonky. Was doing maintenance on my main slug to upgrade samba and screwed up big time (my fault). So I opted to put my backup Slug into the spotlight. Ish, I discovered that the fan in the enclosure had failed and the drive was overeating and failing badly.

So can someone recommend me good and reasonably priced IDE (or IDE & SATA) USB2.0 enclosures for 3.5 inch drives for me ? The enclosure I had were cheap Cintre Zdisk which I have been quite displeased with from the start (poor fitting, noisy, flimsy hardware, never got the mail in rebate from the company and now failure).

Thanks for the help (and reading through my adventure/complaints)
Patrick S.

[rpedde]

@sansp00 wrote:

Well, Im back from slug hell … Like for many other things, Murphy’s law stroke again.
Just to put everybody in the context:
I run 2 (a main & a backup) Unslung NSLU2 (unslung to a flash drive) with a HDD hooked up to each (320Gig and 250Gig) to run backups, FF and Twonky. Was doing maintenance on my main slug to upgrade samba and screwed up big time (my fault). So I opted to put my backup Slug into the spotlight. Ish, I discovered that the fan in the enclosure had failed and the drive was overeating and failing badly.

So can someone recommend me good and reasonably priced IDE (or IDE & SATA) USB2.0 enclosures for 3.5 inch drives for me ? The enclosure I had were cheap Cintre Zdisk which I have been quite displeased with from the start (poor fitting, noisy, flimsy hardware, never got the mail in rebate from the company and now failure).

Thanks for the help (and reading through my adventure/complaints)
Patrick S.

I’ve got three different ones that I don’t like. Two adaptec ones, two Macally ones, and two from a company called “Mad Dog”, that I think is oem’d by someone else.

Not happy with any of them.

I’ve been fairly pleased with the IBM/Hitachi hard drives I have though — you have to set the spindown from a dos boot disk with the drive attached to an ide cable, but once that’s done, it works fine.

— Ron

[Jxn]

I have a Xtend disk. It’s called Xtend AdStore XAS3UI250 250GB harddsic.
Nice case with a small, quiet fan. The NSL2U gets hotter.
Quite and cooler than the LaCie Porsche 250GB / USB disk I had before. It was very hot, not designed for running continues, I guess. Wouldn’t recommend that to a NSLU2 anyway.

[rpedde]

@Jxn wrote:

I have a Xtend disk. It’s called Xtend AdStore XAS3UI250 250GB harddsic.
Nice case with a small, quiet fan. The NSL2U gets hotter.
Quite and cooler than the LaCie Porsche 250GB / USB disk I had before. It was very hot, not designed for running continues, I guess. Wouldn’t recommend that to a NSLU2 anyway.

So far we have a fair list of unrecommended ones. Anyone have any they recommend? I heard that the maxtor ones are pretty decent, but don’t actually have one (except an mss).

[Jxn]

Of the two I have tested, the Xtend case with Samsung disk is really good. And it’s easy to switch disc in that case.
It works better then the LaCie (low cost) Porsche disk, which started to fail on me after 9 month.
So yes, the four month test period I have tried the Xtend, I would recommend it. But by that time, even the Porsche was ok.
I am a bit carefull though, after my LaCie Porsche experiance. 🙄
What the heck, I have good feelings about the Xtend. And it has good reviews, compared to the Porsche.

[sansp00]

Anyone has Vantec ? I’ve read some reviews here and there, but I doubt most users put them in the same condition as we do …

Patrick S.

[richdunlop]

I used a passively cooled icy box (IB-351StUS-B) SATA->USB enclosure with a 3.5″ Hitachi disk for a while. It worked well and the drive never seemed to get too hot. I’d recommend it on the basis that it was a simple affair without much to go wrong!

[kellyharding]

http://tinyurl.com/3xvqom

I use on them of them with a 500Gb Seagate drive.

Seagate are about the only drives I’ll touch really now.

The enclosure is cheap, and not overly brilliant in terms of design in some respects, but it gets the job done.

And the hard drive runs at 44 deg. C (my 24 port switch blows cold air over it :D).

Kelly

[quack]

I have a couple of the Vantec NST-360U2 cases – the shiny fanless metal fingerprint-magnet ones.

I’ve been running one as a general storage drive (running 24/7 for a month, put away on the shelf for a month, run up & down stairs between PCs for a week etc etc) for about a year with an 80GB Seagate drive in it.

I’ve also got 2 with 4 year old 300GB Maxtor drives in which have been running 24/7 on my slug since April. OK, not the longest test case but the best I can offer!

Yes, they run rather warm but I guess all the heat that’s radiated from the case is heat that’s not inside cooking the drive 🙂

Two samples which have survived 4 months doesn’t really guarantee you anything though! They’ll probably both die tomorrow now.

[sansp00]

Quite a coincidence … I actually bought the Vantec enclosure. Read so many good reviews on them. After running them for a week, I’m quite impressed. They are pretty well built and easy to use. Aside the heat you describe (which BTW is much less than the older enclosure I had for which the fan broke) is not that bad.

As for the 4 months trial, hell, my Cintre enclosure sucked from the start, so 4 months is good enough for me 😉 The fan started making noise after 2 weeks and finally died after a couple of months.

Patrick S.

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