such as any of these:
I have a few internal drives sitting around unused that I’d like to use for storage.
What is your experience with these? Are they worth it? Are they reliable? Or should i just get an external drive and call it a day?
I was looking into this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153066
for less of a permanent thing and more for troubleshooting/scanning/etc.
Most of those cheap enclosures are reliable so long as you dont pull the drive all the time. Theyre usually made poorly and the SATA connector or USB port will break off, etc.
But theyre almost always SLOW. As long as you can handle 10-30 MB/s speeds, youd be fine with USB 2.0. And you usually dont really know what speeds youre going to get out of it, unless you read reviews.
Id stick with a highly reviewed one, or just go for one of those drive ‘docks’ like Prog linked. Theyre great for temp or backup storage. Just drop a drive in and youre good.
Ive got one, its pretty decent. only issue I had was my own doing.
I copied or so i thought, all the files to my desktop. then wiped the drive, and it didnt fully copy the files.
FML. that was some years back tho. I learned my lessons.
I’m waiting for the USB 3.0 devices.
my laptop has an eSATA connection, so i was thinking about going that route. 2 of my spare HDDs are also SATA. Would that be a big difference compared the the USB 2.0 ones?
I really just want it so i can store movies on the drives. I wouldn’t be streaming from them, just storing. I’m starting to amass a good collection of x264 movies, which obviously are a couple gb’s each. I can’t justify buying an external drive when i have over a tb of data storage sitting on unused internal drives.
I have been using a usb enclosure for years now with no problems. It’s a little slow if you are moving a lot of files at the same time but other than that it works great.