Acomdata Samba USB 2.0 3.5-Inch IDE/SATA Hard Drive Enclosure SMBXXXU2E-BLU (Blue)

This enclosure is solidly built, finely finished, with good fit for 3.5" internal hard drives of various brands, and easily to assemble. It offers IDE or SATA to USB 2.0 interfaces. The blue colored part is an aluminum case that helps dissipate the drive heat without cooling fan noises (the remainder gray parts are plastic). There are three popular colors in matte finish to choose from: red, blue, and black. The vertical stand is attached to the enclosure by a groove and two screws for added stability. The blue indicator light is an approximate match to the blue color of the enclosure case.

I used a Seagate IDE 250GB and a Hitachi SATA 500GB in the enclosure for the trials. Windows XP and Windows Vista readily recognized the assembled external hard drives. They were shown as USB devices with their respective hard drive product numbers and not the identity of the enclosure chipset. This could be important as some hard drive's proprietary software, such as Seagate...Read more

I'm so disappointed! All these good reviews for this thing, and it doesn't work right. Let me say here that I tried it with my HP desktop and Dell laptop and get exactly the same results. Specifically:
I hooked it up per the instructions, turned it on, and... nothing. The computer didn't even see it. So I unplugged the USB cable and when I plugged it back in, the computer saw it and it came up. Great! Turned it off, turned it back on... nothing.

After MUCH experimentation I found that the drive must be powered on BEFORE being plugged in to the computer, which is not only contrary to the instructions, it's just stupid. It means you either have to let the drive spin constantly (stupid) or you have to disconnect the drive from the computer every time you turn it off (again, stupid).

If you leave the drive spinning, you can connect and disconnect the USB cable all you want, it recognizes it every time.

Makes no difference whether or not you...Read more

I tried this with both an old PATA/IDE and a new SATA drive; both worked flawlessly. The IDE drive required a jumper setting to "Master"; no jumpers were required for the SATA (WD Caviar). The printed manual is a lot better than what one usually sees with this type of product, but not as complete as the documentation on the included CD-ROM.

pros: very quiet, fanless, good build quality for the price, nice stand. Looks better than most enclosures.

cons: IDE connector is mounted on the PCB board, so you have to be a bit careful. The blue light is rather glaring.