3.5" External Enclosure Help Needed!

Hey I'm thinking of buying a 3.5" External Enclosure. However, first I got some question. Is a external enclosure better than one of those 3.5" external hard drive?

I never used an external enclosure before; however, from what I hear it can pretty much run any kind of SATA hard drive.

If this is the case doesn't that make a 3.5" External Enclosure way better than any other 3.5" external hard drive. Because most desktop 3.5" SATA hard drive has a 32MB cache while most 3.5" external hard drive only have a 16MB cache.

Also which external enclosure brand is good(btw I would want Esata/USB)? also can someone recommend me a 1TB or 1TB+ hard drive to go with it also?

Edit: Hmmm actually can I ask one more question. What kind of external hard drive do you guys recommend? With E-Sata also.

 

A SATA drive in 3.5" external enclosure is the exact same thing as a 3.5" external hard drive. It's bundled together for you in the latter case, and you have to choose your own drive and enclosure in the former case. If you get a 3.5" SATA enclosure, you can definitely run any 3.5" SATA drive. If you're using the external device as a storage medium, the cache size on your HDD of choice is next to irrelevant.

No recommendations on the actually HDD... if it's just for storage, I'd honestly get the cheapest 1TB drive I could find. Others may beg to differ.

 

I was talking to a tech at one time and he mentioned that the hard drives they bundle together in external hard drives are typically those which undergo less testing than individual hard drive you buy for your computer as a replacement drive. So if this is infact true, the advantage of building your own external hard drive would to increase reliability. I suppose it kinda makes sense.

Seagate makes excellent drives and Nexstar makes excellent enclosures. Both can be bought from NCIX for great prices.

 

Nexstar makes good enclosures? I was looking into some Rosewill. Btw I am choosing an external enclosure being I've heard alot of things about external hard drive failures... And about how e-sata doesn't work well on some Western Digital stuff and etc. Plus I've heard a lot of negative comments about Seagate external hard drive, but I have never heard anything about a regular Seagate 3.5" Sata hard drive... Which is kind of weird.

 

Hmmm actually can I ask one more question. What kind of external hard drive do you guys recommend? With E-Sata also.

 

Seagate drives are excellent. They typically come with 5-10 year warranties so rest assured their quality. I'm talking about their internal drives, btw, not the external hard drives. Like I mentioned before, the internal drives are better quality then the external drives. Take a look at the Seagate Barracuda drives.

I have a Nexstar enclosure and haven't had any problems. They also come with clear instructions, unlike a lot of the cheaper brands.

 

Choosing from a higher HD cache is indeed better, but you have to consider the manufacturer as well, I would go for Seagate they do have plenty of models to choose from which gives you a better chance of finding the HD component that you are looking for.. I wish you best of luck RedNara..

 

do you think this is a good enclosure?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817347017

i have a freeagent 1tb desk drive and i want to take the drive out of it and put it in this case. will it work?

 

BTW i purchased a 1 TB Western Digital My Book Home Edition and so far had no problems. If i were u i would purchase a Seagate external hard drive as i heard their external hard drives are failing 66% of the time....