Which 2.5" external enclosure should I get for what will be an internal HDD?

I am looking for an enclosure to fit a 320GB Western Digital or Seagate drive. I am going to clone my current HDD onto it then swap them. I have seen a couple that say they only support up to 160GB but some people have use a 320GB in them.

Also has Seagate or Western Digital had any issues lately with there laptop hard drives? I've seen a couple threads saying that Seagate had some a while a go but I am wondering if they have been fixed because the Seagate has a better benchmark score than the Western Digital but it looks like both will be better than my 160GB 7200RPM stock Hitachi.

Anybody have an experience with any of the enclosures? I will probably only be using it for cloning because I am planning on putting the Hitachi in another laptop come July. I will be buying both the HDD and the enclosure from http://newegg.com within the next week or so.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

 

Hi
I just bought this nice enclosure on monday ..
take a look :

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817392009

Have it, would by it again without hesitation

Assuming this is for a SATA hard drive, of course

 

Go for a Vantec enclosure, they make quality stuff.

Theres no capacity limitations for enclosures. An enclosure is basically just a shell with a SATA to USB cable.

Go for a 320gb WD scorpio black, its the fastest mechanical HD in the market at the moment (from what i read)

 

Flipfire, there are no limitations on a case? Yar, I made sure to pick out the Transcend because it was said to work with a WD 500. My bad :/

Anyways, I just bought that Transcend above and one of these Acomdata cases. The Acomdata seems to be one of the least expensive esata cases at the moment when used with its rebate.

 

i could be wrong but somehow i heard that some 2.5 sata HDD are longer than 9.5", is that true? if yes, a different enclosure will be needed? or most enclosure will fit these 2 sizes of HDD?

 

Yes, there are a few 2.5" HDDs that are 1/2" (12.5mm) thick. Most of the early 500GB HDDs such as the Hitachi 5K500 (as opposed to the new 5K500.B) are 1/2" thick. There's no reason to currently think of buying a 1/2" thick unit. Few enclosures will hold the 1/2" thick HDDs. In the past I have done a temporary work-around by using the connector without the enclosure.

One other aspect to consider is whether to get an enclosure with eSATA connector in addition to USB. An increasing number of notebooks are including an eSATA port and this lets the HDD run at the same speed as if it was internal.

John

 

What is the difference in internal interface? Can someone explain the differences between SATA, IDE, SATA I/II, etc.? Any suggestions on which interface to buy or is it preference?

I've never done this before so I wouldn't mind trying to keep it as simple as possible.

Thanks

 

The internal interface in the enclosure needs to match the HDD's interface. Older HDDs are PATA / IDE and the newer HDDs are SATA. eSATA, which I mentioned above, only works for SATA HDDs.

There is an enclosure which supports both interfaces, but is hard to find.

John

 

Pretty much all recent mainstream HDDs are SATA (replacing the aging PATA/IDE). Don't worry about SATA I/II (SATA 150/300), they make no difference for HDDs.

 

I've got about 10 of these out in the field for consultants with WD Scorpio Blacks, they run vm's off them and are used for backups via esata.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817159070

 

Does anyone know how to make an XP Recovery disk using ThinkVantage? I've heard you can only do it once so I dont want to mess up and I need to get it right the first time.

Is it true you can only do this once?