HotGears

Customer Reviews:
Noisy
Work a pretty well but it doesn’t have any protection for harddrives and the sound its a high

Worked fine till the magic smoke came out.
Despite being pretty flimsy, I had high hopes for this case. Until I moved it for the first time and one of the components on the controller burned up.

In the trash it went, I’m off to shop for something better.

Much better than reviews suggest
I don’t know whether they’ve upgraded the design of this device or what, but I’m a 57 year old who has decent but not extraordinary computer skills, and I found the installation of this unit extremely easy. It took me about 10 minutes to mount my SATA hard drive, and then it was just a question of activating and formatting the drive. No problem. Works great. And as for the construction, hard drives create a good deal of heat, and the unit seems designed to dissipate as much as possible, as simply as possible. The sides are MEANT to come out easily - they are NOT glued. I’ve rated it as a four-star only because the directions are in slightly fractured - but understandable - English.

Works great! Saved me a lot of work and money!
I was kinda worried when I read the other reviews for this product, but I had recently lost my desktop PC’s Windows system drive and my only hope was to put it into an enclosure like this and try to fix it from my laptop. I was not disappointed! I’m very glad I purchased this device and consider it a steal at the price Amazon has. The drive that failed is an IDE, but I knew I would want the flexibility of installing a SATA drive for use as an external storage device, and this seemed like the only enclosure capable of doing both.

It’s not flimsy as other reviews have called it, but the whole thing basically comes apart in four pieces when you undo the screws to install the drive. If you do it in your lap, it’ll be a handful, but it’s really easy to put together again. The materials are first-rate, and the enclosure has plenty of ventilation holes. I wish it had a fan, but after more than 12 hours of continuous running I encountered no heat-related problems. It has both IDE and SATA interfaces inside, the IDE is easier to install than the SATA, but both are very easy to do. I think the easiest way to install the IDE is to pull the data cable off the enclosure’s circuit board and plug it into the drive first, then plug in the power connector to the drive, place the drive in the enclosure and finally plug the other end of the data cable back onto the circuit board. To connect a SATA drive later, it was necessary for me to remove the IDE cable entirely. Unfortunately I found no easy way to stash the cable in the enclosure itself for safe keeping.

There are two external interface options, the USB 2.0 and an eSATA. A USB cable is supplied with the unit but no eSATA cable. This was a little disappointing, since I think the eSATA would be potentially faster. I don’t have an eSATA port on my laptop so having both options is good, but I’ll get a cable and use the eSATA from my desktop in the future. The USB 2.0 interface is a little slow, of course, compared to a drive installed directly in a PC.

In summary, I was able to take my failed Windows drive and repair the file system on it from my laptop using this enclosure. I recovered everything and got my desktop back up and running 100%. I also installed a 500GB WD SATA drive to use as external storage and that’s working great. I highly recommend this enclosure!

Why there’s no 0 rating on Amazon?
This garbage, like everything else offered by TigerDirect didn’t work for Sata. It died after a week or so.