OT: Best choice of 750GB hard drive

"journey" wrote:
> FWIW, I ended up getting a Thermaltake Max 4 enclosure:
>
> http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Produc...C=1285&ID=1659
>
> The reason I went with that one is that I read a lot of reviews and of
> the ones I read, there were no complaints about heating. As you can
> see from the web page, it's cooled very well.
>
> Picking an enclosure was very hard because every enclosure that I read
> reviews of had bad customer experiences. I wonder if competitors
> submit bad reviews -- certainly wouldn't be difficult to do that.
>
> Anyway, just wanted to share what I found to be one of the best so
> that it might help someone else looking for an enclosure.


It looks good, and the cooling plan looks good. Most of the gripes
about cooked external drives that I've read in the newsgroups, though,
involved convectively cooled drives. But at $60 per enclosure, I think
it's overpriced. I paid $25 or $30 for my Kingwin when I bought it
5 months ago from TigerDirect. It has an aluminum body and a 80mm
cooling fan mounted agains the belly of the drive, just like the Thermaltake,
although the fan is not directly exposed to the exterior (making it quieter).

You may find that the stiff eSATA cable tends to cause the enclosure
to squirm around on the desk or to even fall over. The solution to that
is a flexible "round" eSATA cable from Silicon Valley Compucycle
(www.SVC.com). That cable isn't pictured on their website, so you may
have to call them to find out if it's still available. The brand name of the
"round" eSATA cable that I got from SVC is "OK Gear". It made the
difference between practicality and impracticality of eSATA for my
Dell XPS-M1330 laptop.

*TimDaniels*