Customer Reviews

StarTech 2.5in Black eSATA USB External Hard Drive Enclosure for SATA HDD

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Decent enclosure everything is fine, but ... it does only work in SATA-150 mode. As my SSD was severly crippled I decided to return the item.

It seems that enclosures with autodetection of mode (USB vs eSATA) do not work in SATA II mode.

Summary: if you want to use it on eSATA, DON'T BUY IT! Read on if you want details.

I purchased this because I replaced my internal HDD with an SSD and wanted to use it as an external HDD (obviously). The main reason why I chose this product is because it offered eSATA connection.

I installed the WD Scorpio Blue that came out of my laptop and connected it via eSATA. Speed was nice, around 100MB/s transfer speed. Thought it's all good. BUT! After leaving it connected for a few minutes and not using it, when trying to access a file stored on it, it would freeze for a couple of minutes before doing anything. Needless to say this was making it useless. Tried it on another laptop and the same problem occurred and this one had a totally different version of Windows. This problem didn't appear when testing it on USB3, but I needed it to use the eSATA port as I had no spare USB ports. After talking to StarTech support they said my enclosure must be faulty and recommended me to replace it, which I did thanks to Amazon's brilliant services.

When the replacement arrived, the same problem was there. Therefore it's not the OS' fault, it's not my PC's fault, so I tried using it with another drive. The same thing happened with a Toshiba HDD. Therefore, the only thing left to blame is the enclosure.

If you want to use it on USB3, you can go ahead and buy it, but if you're planning to use it via eSATA keep looking. I suggest buying an eSATAp cable (note the p there, also named Power Over eSATA). That's what I use and I get crazy speeds via only 1 cable, at a third of the price of this enclosure.

It is quite a nicely made product and the packaging is great (aluminium, vibration & shock dampers, 4 screws, screwdriver, easy to install) so I will give it 3 stars because of this and because it works fine on USB3, even though it was useless to me.

Nice enclosure, really easy to set up, even came with the tools.

Takes any 2.5 inch SATA drive. I fitted a 500Gb drive which seems to run silent and cool.

USB 2.0 or eSATA option is good. eSATA is really fast but needs 2 ports on my laptop. I have a dual purpose eSATA/USB socket but eSATA doesn't supply power so a second power only USB cable needs to be plugged in to a USB port to operate the drive.

Comes with all the cables, the USB and eSATA cables are 1m long but the USB power cable is only 70cm.

Works great on USB, blisteringly fast on eSATA. Mine has a 1Tb Samsung in it, which is rated at 0.7A peak, but runs happily on USB, without the need to boost power with the supplied USB power lead - though this lead is needed to power an eSATA connection.

Construction is solid and attractive, neat case that takes the drive and the three leads comfortably - unlike other caddies.

A few words of caution:

Some drives will not run happily on 500mA. You may find USB connection works only with the extra USB power connection lead in, but eSATA does not. Make sure the hard drive you install will be happy on 500mA (USB standard current).

Depending on your hardware and OS, you may or may not be able to "safely remove" this hardware in eSATA mode. Do NOT just pull the plug if no "safely remove" option is available - the drive will not be parked. To remove hot, go into device manager, select the drive and uninstall it - you'll hear it wind down - then remove it. You may also find that the drive will not always detect when hot plugged - again down to OS and hardware. Recent kit and OS should be largely OK - XP can be flakey!

One star lost because the above potential problems could and should have been outlined by Startech in their "manual" which only covers driver installation; and because the USB power lead should be longer to work easily with eSATA.

If I still had the box, I'd return this. But I haven't, so too bad. Excellent delivery from Amazon, who are in no way responsible for this.

Like a previous reviewer, plugging this in to my Dell laptop's E-SATA port shows a SATA-2 disk only to be working at SATA-1 speed. Just to be sure it wasn't an anomaly with my particular disk (Seagate Blue), I borrowed a colleague's Samsung 830 SSD - and got exactly the same problem.

Startech don't want to know - I raised this with their US Support, who had never heard of the problem before - and alleged the issue must be with my drive. Not so.

Disappointed. I've since ordered an ESATA cable with power for about a fiver, which my colleague with the Samsung SSD uses. Plugged that in, connected my Seagate and it immediately saw it as SATA-2. This cable costs just over a fiver - search for Wentronic 0.5m HDD Power eSATA Cable eSATA I-Type to SATA HDD Plug.

This isn't a cheapest of the cheap unbranded generic enclosure. It is a branded, sleek, nice looking, quality enclosure bundled with all cables and a simple pouch at a reaonable price.

Not having USB 3 yet but having eSATA on my Dell laptop I got this instead of the more popular USB 3 enclosures. I've used it with my new Samsung 1TB for eSATA backups and have been using it on another laptop via USB 2 cloning and replacing a damaged 500GB WD drive all with no problems. Makes a change to have a branded device in a well packaged retail box who's manufacturers even have a website.

This is just what the doctor ordered for me. I use it with a 500Gb drive with Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system on it with Hyper-V and have several different virtual machines for BizTalk development purposes. My laptop has an eSata port and I can select to boot from this enclosure if I wish. I really like the fact that I can make use of the speed benefits that eSata brings.

The results are very reliable and allow me to extend what I can do with my laptop almost as much as I like. I have a second similarly spec'ed one that I use for archiving, so in one situation I can boot from an external enclosure and in the other case expand connected high speed diskspace for use with my core system.

The price for this is so little, for so much functionality and it is also backward compatible with USB2.
Just great!

I 'm rather impressed by the product considering its price. It has a nice solid aluminum feel and it comes with all the cables, screws (2 extra in case you lose some) and a small screwdriver, it even has a leather-looking case for the thing. And it works as it's supposed to. Great product. It was delivered really fast and came in nice packaging.
Bottom line: Great product, great seller, highly recommended.

bought this to enclose old hard drive from laptop after upgrading it.
very pleased with the finish and ease of use of this unit.
made of aluminium not plastic so heat dissapation should be excellent.
currently attached to laptop and backing up my documents as we speak via the eSata connection and included cabes.
brilliant.

I bought this with a 7200rpm hard drive to build a portable hard drive. When using on my desktop via eSATA, the speed could reach 90MB/s, but it is just around 60MB/s on my laptop via eSATA, which I reckon it is due to the something wrong with the laptop. BTW, you have to enable AHCI in the BIOS to enable the safely remove of it, otherwise it won't show up when you plug it in when using eSATA cable.