When it’s better not to use a Hard Drive Enclosure
Whilst Hard Drive enclosures are an excellent way of reusing your old hard disk drive and creating a back up solution there are times when their use is not appropriate.
Hard Drives enclosures are really designed as a permanent or semi permanent solution for your HDD. This is simply because the enclosures are designed to provide a “protective wrapper” around the Hard Drive that then allows you to carry it with you or in the case of larger enclosures for 3.5″ HDD’s to stand it on your desktop.
To use the enclosure you’ll typically need a screwdriver and a few minutes to open the case, carefully insert and connect the Hard Drive, secure the Hard Drive in place and then reseal the enclosure using the supplied screws. Not difficult to do but it does take a little time and its not something you want to be doing every day.
So, if you’ve got lots of Hard Drives that you want to use, to test or recover data from then a dedicated enclosure is probably not the way to go. Similarly if you’re an IT or support engineer and part of your job is to test Hard Drives an enclosure will use up valuable time and just be cumbersome. You’d also have to have an enclosure for each size and type of Hard Drive, e.g. 2.5″ Hard Drives, 3.5″ Hard Drive and then a version for IDE and a version for SATA – simply not practical.
A much simpler option in these circumstances is to use a USB to IDE and SATA Cable kit.
These IDE and SATA kits are worth their weight in gold because they support pretty much every Hard Drive you will encounter, they come with a power supply so that you can independently power the hard drive and they connect via the ubiquitous USB.
They’re not pretty to look at and you wouldn’t use then for a permanent connection but if you’re simply looking for a quick and effective way to test hard drives or to recover data from hard drives then these kits are an excellent solution.
They work with all current PC operating systems and with Macs and the easy set up means you can be up and running in seconds. (Remember for 3.5″ Hard Drives you’ll need to set the “jumpers” to Master before connecting the HDD or it will not be recognised).
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