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looking for a good 5.25 and 3.5 enclosures

post #1 of 18
3/28/05 at 4:22am
Thread Starter 
I am going to be moving to a laptop only and I need a 3.5 enclosure for my 160 gig hard drive and a 5.25 enclosure for my dvd burner.What are some good fast enclosures out there?
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post #2 of 18
3/28/05 at 5:15am
It's not very easy to answer properly to your question. There are many many "no name" manifacturers of enclosures. I have experience with 2.5, USB2 - first I bought one, which was working on 2 from 10 PC's ( there was something wrong with recognizing and instaling the driver) Than I change it to another one, again USB2, "no name" which is still working perfectly with my 60Gigs 7200 HDD seven months later. I can plug it in every USB port under WinXP, and access my data in 10 seconds. And it's pretty fast. So my sugestion is: buy any USB2 enclosure, and check it by connecting it (with hard drive or DVD burner inside of course) to at least 10-15 different PC's . If it's recognizing proprly everyware and the system is installing the driver automaticaly, here you go.
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post #3 of 18
3/28/05 at 6:53am
also keep in mind that some enclosures have an absolute crap transfer rate, i compared a Kingwin and Vibe enclosure in another thread, the most the Kingwin could transfer at was 13MB/s while the cheaper (both price and material wise) vibe enclosure was as fast as the HDD could go at 33+MB/s. both enclosures are recognized in any computer running XP
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post #4 of 18
3/28/05 at 1:03pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by pr50wner
also keep in mind that some enclosures have an absolute crap transfer rate, i compared a Kingwin and Vibe enclosure in another thread, the most the Kingwin could transfer at was 13MB/s while the cheaper (both price and material wise) vibe enclosure was as fast as the HDD could go at 33+MB/s. both enclosures are recognized in any computer running XP
yeah, you post made me realize that not all usb enclosures are the same. I was just wondering if there was any specific name that people knew was good.
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post #5 of 18
3/28/05 at 1:10pm
How do u benchmark a hd?

How do u find out what the transfer rate is etc.?
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post #6 of 18
3/28/05 at 3:08pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Studio54
How do u benchmark a hd?

How do u find out what the transfer rate is etc.?
Basic tests. Transfer a large number of files (ie.: 100 MB worth) and time it. 50 seconds mean 2MB/second, for example.

BTW, I've known KingWin to be the king (pun intended ) in storage products. I have 2 3.5" trays and pullout racks, a 2.5" USB 2.0 HDD enclosure, and used to have a 3.5" USB 2.0 HDD enclosure which I have a since sold because I didn't need it. They all work great.

Quote:
also keep in mind that some enclosures have an absolute crap transfer rate, i compared a Kingwin and Vibe enclosure in another thread, the most the Kingwin could transfer at was 13MB/s while the cheaper (both price and material wise) vibe enclosure was as fast as the HDD could go at 33+MB/s. both enclosures are recognized in any computer running XP
pr50wner, which KingWin product exactly were you using in this test?
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post #7 of 18
3/28/05 at 4:51pm

hdparm

Quote:
Originally Posted by Studio54
How do u benchmark a hd?
Well, on Linux, there's an easy, "quick and dirty" transfer test:

hdparm -Tt /dev/hdc

You can also create a large file (say, 1GB so it can't all be held in cache) and try transferring it a few times using a stopwatch to get a good guesstimate.

That's basically what hdparm does. Tries sequential and random reads from the media, and reports back on the time it takes. You can boot from a knoppix CD (http://www.knoppix.org/) to run this and a bunch of other nifty Linux-based utilities without ever installing Linux on your machine.

Of course, driver differences make life tough. Linux has a generic USB drive driver which works for pretty much everything, and if the bad transfer rates previously reported were actually due to a bad driver rather than poorly-implemented interface or something, you may not be able to test that adequately.
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post #8 of 18
3/28/05 at 5:22pm
At least for FireWire if you want the best transfer rate, you must look for enclosers with Oxford IDE to FW chip.
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post #9 of 18
3/28/05 at 7:56pm
I have a Venus DS3 3.5 enclosure for a 250Gig drive and it works great. I'm pretty sure it has the Oxford FW chipset. Black aluminum and there is a version with USB2.0 and FW. It came with FW and USB cables also, so I ended up not needing the one I bought from acortech. It even has a silent fan on the bottom, not that it needs it. The drive def makes more noise than the fan if your worried about it. but ok i'm done rambling now...
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post #10 of 18
3/28/05 at 8:11pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Studio54
How do u benchmark a hd?

How do u find out what the transfer rate is etc.?
HDTune will read externals as well as internal drives. Freeware, Google it.
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post #11 of 18
3/28/05 at 8:31pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by epp_b
pr50wner, which KingWin product exactly were you using in this test?
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applicatio...266&CatId=1204

its that one, it just absolutly sucks.


there are a couple ways to benchmark HDD's you can use sisoftsandra, it has an HDD benchmark that tells you max unbuffered read and write speeds, i use my gigabit network with DU meter to see how fast i can go. the network is WAY faster than any HDD.
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post #12 of 18
3/28/05 at 8:51pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by pr50wner
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applicatio...266&CatId=1204

its that one, it just absolutly sucks.
Oh, great, that's the exact same one I have I've been using it for over a year now and I'm perfectly happy with it.

Were you using it on USB 1.0, 1.1, or 2.0? Also, were you using a 4200 RPM drive? These alone or combined could easily be a major bottleneck (FYI, I use a 4200 RPM drive on USB 1.1 and am very happy with it)
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post #13 of 18
3/28/05 at 9:17pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by epp_b
Oh, great, that's the exact same one I have I've been using it for over a year now and I'm perfectly happy with it.

Were you using it on USB 1.0, 1.1, or 2.0? Also, were you using a 4200 RPM drive? These alone or combined could easily be a major bottleneck (FYI, I use a 4200 RPM drive on USB 1.1 and am very happy with it)
lol

well here are some benchmarks, Burst rate is the max bandwidth of the usb enclosures

Samsung 2.5" 40GB HDD in Vibe USB Enclosure (cheap plastic one lol)



Hitachi 2.5" 20GB HDD in Kingwin Enclosure (Expensive enclosure) notice the bandwidth is stuck at 11.x MB/s? it will never go above that, dont matter what drive is in the enclosure



Samsung 5400RPM 8MB cache Laptop drive on Internal IDE



Maxtor 3.5" 7200RPM 8MB Cache 80GB



Seagate 3.5" 7200RPM 8MB Cache Dual 80GB SATA Drives in Raid 0

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post #14 of 18
3/28/05 at 9:28pm
oh BTW HDTune works pretty good to benchmark
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post #15 of 18
3/29/05 at 1:58am
Interesting tests. I just ran a simple test of my own.

Drives used were:
- Maxtor 3.5" 10GB 5400RPM ATA100 (internal)
- Fujitsu 2.5" 20GB 4200RPM ATA100 (external, USB 1.1)

I copied 51.7MB (in the form of a lot of small, individual files) in 37 seconds. That comes out to roughly 1.38 MB/s. Since USB 1.1 is 12 Mbps and 12/8 = 1.5 (MB/s), those tests seem pretty much at par to me. 1.2 MB/s ain't bad for overhead, etc., if you ask me

I'd run it at 2.0, but I don't have any 2.0 ports
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post #16 of 18
3/29/05 at 6:04am
lol of course its going to max out your usb1.1 connection first, but if you had a usb2 which maxes at a theoretical 60MB/s then you will notice no matter what HDD you put in, its stuck at 12-13MB/s
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post #17 of 18
3/29/05 at 9:38am

Mapower

Mapower at Newegg.com

I've been through this a few times and recently bought a couple 3.5" Mapower aluminum USB2 enclosres from Newegg. Good transfer rates, small, fanless formfactor (no heat problems and it's warm where I live), and they look good. Best of all, only about $35. I would imagine that the 5.25" version uses the same USB2 chipset (same transfer speeds).

They also have Firewire versions and USB2/Firewire combo enclosures.

-Doc
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post #18 of 18
3/29/05 at 12:34pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by pr50wner
lol of course its going to max out your usb1.1 connection first, but if you had a usb2 which maxes at a theoretical 60MB/s then you will notice no matter what HDD you put in, its stuck at 12-13MB/s
You still didn't answer the question as to whether or not you were using a 4200 RPM drive.

The only real test would be to use the same hard drive in both enclosures.
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