External Hard Drive Enclosure Recommendation

I will be buying my first SSD soon. I want an external enclosure to use first as a transfer kit, then to house my 500GB HDD which currently resides in my laptop. I will use this as my primary backup (cloning the drive so I can minimize crash recovery time).

My laptop has both USB 3.0 and eSATA connecters. Is one better than the other? My laptop is SATAII. I assume that will be my bottleneck in transferring files, right? But my next lapto will certainly be SATAIII.

I need a 2.5" enclosure, but here are my questions.
1) Should I get USB 3.0 or eSATA?
2) Do I need a fan in the enclosure? My use is backup, not constant read/writes of large data files.
3) Any specific product recommendation?

 

1) Go for USB 3.0, it is backwards compatible with USB2.0 as well so you'll have a more universal enclosure and you will still get the max speed supported by your HDD anyways.
2) You definitely do not need a fan, even if you abuse the drive, with a good aluminum enclosure, the drive should stay in the low 40s Celcius.
3) Personally, i have tried Vantec and Mukii enclosures, both are pretty solid, but i feel that the Vantecs offers more bang for the buck than the Mukiis and my Mukii USB 3.0 enclosure doesn't seem to like the frontal USB3 port on my desktop, i have a feeling it's the cable rather than the enclosure itself, but i don't have another cable to test.

Here's my personal recommendation: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817392038

 

I just ordered that enclosure from Amazon. Thanks for answering my questions and providing a recommendation.

 

Can anyone see any issues with this plan? Thanks knight427 +1 REP for your PM response.
1. Format the 500 GIG Seagate Momentus that came with the G73 to Fat32 with Ubuntu live CD ( I want to Store images on it from Ubuntu and Win 7 as well as share files between the 2 OS's.
2, use Seatools for DOS to run a thorough check of the disk. (The disk has been used less than 24 hours)
3. Grab one of the mentioned enclosures in this thread, and put in the Seagate. (Thanks TIJO)
4. I plan to replace the D610 in my signature with a new system that will have Sata III - USB 3 and maybe ESata, it will run some version of linux - file system Ext4
The G73 is NTFS

I now use 3 different 80 GIG hard drives for storage; set to various file systems and want to consolidate . Thanks, Josea

 

Given that you can booth in Linux form a USB (yep tried it with Ubuntu), i don't see any issue with your plan aside that booting from eSATA or USB3 might be an issue or not. It depends whether your laptop can boot from USB3. I think there is a setting that you have to enable for most. I haven't checked yet on my M6700, i was surprised to see the interface of the BIOS which is far from old school.

 

Tijo Congrats on the M6700, awesome specifications. Sorry for the poor wording above;the Seagate drive will only be used for external storage once I know it is "healthy" and it will stay in the enclosure. I reworded the above post for clarity. Thanks for the response!
Nice Tijo!! I was wondering how to get around the 4 GIG limitation of Fat32, and it looks like ExFat FTW!
I ended up ordering this one, it is very similar to the one Tijo linked but it also has the eSata connection (as well as USB)
http://www.amazon.com/Vantec-NexStar3-SuperSpeed-Enclosure-NST-280SU3-BK/dp/B0064I1NQ2
I got this Vantec and it works perfectly, + 1 Tijo

 

With the clarifications, totally, but i suggest the exFAT format.

 

Does anyone ever installed a game into an external drives like the one you mentioned above? I think there might be an issues with "read-only" prevelages.
Whith these issues might not always allow to "write" into the game directories, for saving gaming data.