Thursday, April 20, 2006

World's best USB drive enclosure?

I bought this USB enclosure for my work backup drive about a year ago. Not only has it worked perfectly, it's quiet, fan cooled, has a perfect rating from over 280 geeky NewEgg buyers and is still sold:

AMS VENUS DS-2316B2BK Black External Enclosure - Retail at Newegg.com

It may just be the perfect USB drive enclosure. I'm buying two more to support my home backup.

Update 6/1/06: Never fails.

I write something nice about a device and it shows some warts. See the fan update to an earlier post.

Update 9/1/06: No spin down.

This is the killer requirement, but almost all USB enclosures have this problem. Dan's Data tells us that spindown is essential for the survival of consumer hard drives. I have my laptop set to spindown drives after about 15 minutes of non-use, but I don't think the drive ever spins down in this Venus enclosure.

In summary, requirements for an ideal USB/firewire enclosure:
  • drive spindown
  • extraordinary passive cooling (not sure this is possible)
  • high quality large circumference very quiet fan that's easy to replace (if not passive cooling)
  • well designed wall wart (I prefer the ones where the transformer is a foot or so from the plug)
I'm still looking, but maybe the Network Storage (NAS) devices will be the real answer.

Update 11/16/08: This is the same drive family as reviewed in 2004 by Dan's Data. I'm looking at this because my backups have exceeded the capacity of the drives in these enclosures. So I'm looking for 1TB drives but, for the sake of convenience, will probably buy then bundled with an enclosure. Now if I could find an enclosure that spins down the drive ...

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