Seagate external hard drive casing how to#
Seagate external hard drive casing mac#

LaCie hard drives are popular with Apple Mac users because of their contemporary styling and aluminium casings. Other, less popular interface types are Firewire and Thunderbolt. User opinion varies on which is best.īoth sizes of external hard drive are available in USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and eSATA interfaces. The enclosure of the latter is generally larger since it has to house additional electronics. Because of these power requirements, external 3.5 inch hard drives will either have a built in powerpack or a separate, external powerpack.

These enclosures are physically larger and some units offer installation of more than one drive. If Thunderbolt goes mainstream this will further increase speed!ģ.5 external hard drives utilise desktop drives for storage and need an external power source. In conjunction with USB 3.0, external hard drives can only increase in speed from here. Going forward some 2.5 external disks may use SSD (solid state drives) for storage in place of more traditional mechanical hard drives. USB powered drives range in size from 320GB to Terabyte with 500Gb being the breakpoint for cheap cost per gigabyte at time of writing (May 2012). They use power supplied by the USB interface to spin the drive, removing the requirement for an external power adapter. These drives are smaller and are generally referred to as USB powered external hard drives. External HDDs are available in both 2.5' and 3.5' varieties, the main differences being size and power requirements.Ģ.5 external hard drives use notebook / laptop hard disks for storage. The fact that your circuit board in the enclosure has failed tends to point to the fact that where ever you have been using it is the right place as what kills HDD also kills circuit boards in HDD Enclosures.External hard drives are utilised by users who wish to easily transport, backup or store their data external to their main computer or notebook. While we’ll never see such a enclosure it’s the ideal so you need to keep the drive in a place where it is exposed cooling air and not likely to be bumped around too much. The thing that kills HDD is heat and vibration so ideally you want an enclosure that sheds heat as fast as the drive can make it and isolates the drive from shocks. If you can get a metal one so much the better but just remember not to pick it up after the drive has been running for any length of time. I’ve never had a drive fail in my Antec MX1 enclosure but saying that it was also expensive about 10 times the price of the cheap ones but from my prospective it’s worth every penny. I personally like the Antec MX1 which is a actively cooled enclosure with a great power supply and you can leave a drive running in it virtually all the time if you are so inclined. However saying that there is a proviso I got 1st degree burn off a metal case external HDD that was not supposed to be in the medical establishment and I have no idea just how long it had been running for but needless to say it had been running quite a long time. Shed heat anywhere near as well as metal ones do. Is anyone able to suggest how I go about choosing a hard drive enclosure? or some to look at? My computer is USB 3.0 capable so something that is USB 3.0 would be nice.

Seagate external hard drive casing how to#

From what I found online it is a SATA 6Gb/s interface with a 7200-RPM spin speed… the problem is that I am not a huge computer person and I don’t have a clue what that really means or how to translate that into finding an appropriate hard drive enclosure.

It is from a 3TB Seagate Desktop Drive and the hard drive inside is a Seagate Barracuda 3TB ST3000DM001. I took the hard drive out of the existing casing but have no idea how to make sure the new one I order is what I need. I need to replace the enclosure on my external hard drive as the USB connection is not working (it started only working if positioned a certain way but now will not connect at all.) From talking to friends and reading through other questions I am to the understanding that it is likely the USB adapter part of the hard drive enclosure so if I replace that it should still work fine.