External use for Internal SATA hard drives?

[Keith Outten]

Dennis,

I bought one of the CoolMax aluminum drive boxes from a local computer store. It has a cover plate that slides onto the end of the drive that has an on/off rocker switch and connectors for a USB cable and a power supply for the drive. $20.00

I threw the aluminum case away and just use the cover plate to use internal style SATA Drives for backup purposes or to format old drives. The aluminum case contained the drive and there wasn't any cooling so the drive ran to hot for my tastes.
.

[Bill Huber]

Been there done that with just about everything people posted.
I have ext. SATA drive that works great and I have ext. USB slow and a Firewire 800 ext. drive. They all do the job but......

I now have taken them all off the PC, cleaned off the desk and have gone to Carbonite, for $55 a year, unlimited space you just can't beat it in my eyes.

Set it up and forget it, everything is backed up and I can get anything I would by just restoring it.

Backup drives are good but if you have a fire or a good lighting strike you can kiss it all good by.

[Bryan Morgan]

You can buy a tera byte of storage from Seagate or Wester Digital for approximately $130 to $150 at the office product stores. Probably cheaper other places. Can backup all of your computers running on a home / small network.

Steve

WD and Seagate drives of that size have a lot of reliability issues... Supposedly Samsung is fairly reliable... Newegg has all of them for $100 or less depending on the model.

[Brian Ashton]

You can buy external HDD cases that will do what you want, but I don't think you can buy one that will house more than one drive unless you plan to spend a lot of cash. The alternative is that some can be linked together if you're willing to spend the money. They're pretty basic in that they supply power and are a conduit to access the HDDs so most brands will satisfy your needs.

[Jim O'Dell]

This is what I use also. Lots of places to find them. I think I got mine at Frye's. It hooks up either USB or eSATA, depending on what your computer has available. I'm guessing eSATA would be quicker. The nice thing about this over the external drive I got my wife for back up is that this has an on/off switch, her's doesn't. You don't want a back up drive on all the time. Jim.

the vantec enclosures work very well...

Vantec Nexstar CX 3.5IN SATA to USB 2.0 and eSATA External Hard Drive Enclosure

I have one of the vantec enclosures for extrenal backup.