Has it saved my life? No. My ***? Yes.
Pros:
versatile, inexpensive, easy to use, reliable.
Cons:
none so far.
The Bottom Line:
If you ever need to work on a PC and you want to minimize the risk to your own PC, this enclosure makes life that much easier.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
I've owned this enclosure for about a year now, and I can't overstate how useful it's been. If you've ever run across a machine that's infected with viruses or spyware, or just crashes a lot, but the hardware itself is fine, what do you do to backup the data without jeopardizing your own, working PC? You don't want to network it; you certainly don't want to boot it and spend endless hours trying to fix the problem because "I might lose my pictures..." or whatever. An enclosure like this is a nearly ideal solution. You take the drive out of the problem PC. Install it in the enclosure (which takes about 30 seconds, if you're working slowly.) Connect the power adapter. Connect the USB cable. Connect it to your good PC. Tell Windows to open an Explorer window. Scan drive for viruses. Slowly, steadily, go through the drive, identify the data you need to save. Copy it off the problem drive into a folder on the good PC. Wipe the drive. Put it back in the other PC, reinstall the OS and applications. Burn a CD (or 2 ,or 3) from your PC with the data you backed up, and put the data where it belongs on the freshly built PC.
That's just one scenario. Another - "I've got this old PC I haven't used in a couple of years (because the motherboard died) and I never got my data off the old hard drive. What can I do?" Unless the drive is so hopelessly old that it won't be recognized (drives under 500MB, beware) you can just stick the drive in the enclosure, and copy away.
Mechanically, this enclosure is very easy to use. Push in tabs on the front and rear of each side of the enclosure, pull off the top, connect the drive to the data and power connectors, connect the plastic wheels that secure the drive internally (they screw on like thumb screws), then close it up and you're ready to go. It takes less time then it does to type this paragraph.
This case, along with a similar one in black (my personal favorite) and another one in black for SATA drives, are all available through the CompUSA website, as well as in CompUSA stores. Whether you're building a permanent external hard drive, or use it for rescuing data, these are an amazing value - they're inexpensive, easy to use, and just work.
