Thinkpads Forum

I know various people have had some questions on external USB 2.0 case for 3.5" HDD. So I'm posting this maybe to give people a decent option. It's a metal case internally that cools via conduction so is very slim (no fan). I have a 7200rpm Maxtor in it and the case seems to get warm to the touch, but not overly so even after hours of use. As an added bonus, it's cheap (about $35) and these things come in either silver or ..... a rubber covered matte-black!!!! It's an AWESOME match for our ThinkPads! The only downside is that they have COMPUSA printed on one side, but I can live with it. So obviously, you get these things at COMPUSA so you can pretty much find it anywhere. It didn't have a model number but the SKU is 333112. I searched all over ebay for something like this so I can use some of my old desktop HDDs and they all ended up being more than this after you add in shipping.

schen wrote:I know various people have had some questions on external USB 2.0 case for 3.5" HDD. So I'm posting this maybe to give people a decent option. It's a metal case internally that cools via conduction so is very slim (no fan). I have a 7200rpm Maxtor in it and the case seems to get warm to the touch, but not overly so even after hours of use. As an added bonus, it's cheap (about $35) and these things come in either silver or ..... a rubber covered matte-black!!!! It's an AWESOME match for our ThinkPads! The only downside is that they have COMPUSA printed on one side, but I can live with it. So obviously, you get these things at COMPUSA so you can pretty much find it anywhere. It didn't have a model number but the SKU is 333112. I searched all over ebay for something like this so I can use some of my old desktop HDDs and they all ended up being more than this after you add in shipping.

I have an external USB enclosure for 3.5" HDD as well.....and spares a 160GB (Maxtor). It works like a champ.......just that it doesn't comes with a fan.....cause the material for the enclosure it made of aluminium and heat dissapation is not that great thou....
However, I've been using it in an air-conditioning room.....so, doesn;t really affect it much. By the way, its a Taiwan made brand.

I have some generic brand bought at a local computer shop and it normally houses a 4gb Travelstar hard drive but I often take it apart to copy files to and from my laptop since USB 2.0 is faster than my network is. I actually had no other choice but to make use of my enclosure when I recieved my 560X and needed to put an OS on the hard drive and I had to repeat the process when I recieved a larger hard drive in the mail today that I put in my 560X.

On a semi related subject, I recently got an empty Travelstar 8E setup, which is an older external hdd case with a PCMCIA card.

It worked fine in '98, but DOS mode drivers were a different story. I FINALLY found them, by the way, if anybody needs them.

The COMPUSA case is made in China and does get a little warm, but seems like it doesn't get worse than that though. For course it is in an A/Ced room so it stays pretty cool. I also have one of those aluminum case that is sold very cheaply on ebay for 2.5" drives that I use when I'm on the move and need something small that doesn't require a plug. It's extremely handy for when I'm working on somebody's computer in a place other than home. Right now, it has a 20Gb Travelstar in it that's a reject from a A22m that I was working on. It's supposed to be bad, but has held up so far.

Seems the COMPUSA 3.5" cases are becoming ubiquitous, probably due to the fact that they can be had so cheaply when on sale.

I've got two of them , one dedicated to a 200GB drive for backups and one I leave open so I can easily swap HDs I'm checking for friends or clients.

I grabbed several of those cheap IBM branded 2.5" cases off eBay awhile ago and have two dedicated to backup duties with 7K60s in them and one that I've removed the interface card from and carry around with me to check 2.5" HDs on the road.

Regards,

James

There's a few of those external cases that are not only cheap, but work well too. I'm all about finding those rarities in life that are a double bargain Which is what keeps me using ebay (My wife says, I'm not really looking for a product, I'm just in it to get the bargain). I really intend on setting up like you have with one dedicated to backup and another that I can keep open for various disks that need checking. I also want to get at least one more of those cheap 2.5" enclosures as well that I can just leave the screws out of for notebook drives than need checking.

I do have one other bargain find, though I haven't scraped together enough money to check it out yet. It's a NAS branded Bytecc Model ME-850. We built a new house this year and I put in ethernet everywhere, but only started terminating this last week. Now, I've got the bug and want to have networked storage without having to keep a file server spinning. I looked at the Netgear SC101, but really didn't want to install a Windows only client on all the machines. And I sure don't want to get involved with a non-standard disk format. Supposedly the Bytecc NAS has inbedded Linux running Samba so it should be easy to work with. I even had a server case ready with a 440BX MB to set up as a server, but I'd rather keep that thing as a Linux experimental platform (another reason not to use the Netgear product). Oh yeah, the Bytecc is suppose to be cheap: under $75 "bare"!