Article Index Review: Startech InfoSafe 2.5" SATA External Enclosure Specifications and Features Photo Gallery and Closer Look Verdict and Conclusion

Introduction  

Over the past few years, we've seen loads external enclosures for 3.5" hard drives... some good, some really bad, some even support RAID. Anyway, when people mention external enclosures, they naturally think of 3.5" hard drives, which is pretty much expected. I have to admit, these external enclosures have at times, been life savers for data recovery and file sharing ... but I often find them a little cumbersome to use, and not very practical or portable to carry around. Unfortunately, there is no way around this ... unless of course your hard drive is the smaller 2.5" format. The only problem is ... I haven't seen many external enclosures for 2.5" hard drives. My guess is that there aren't many 2.5" hard drives on desktop PCs the market. However having said that, the recent explosion of 2.5" SDDs (solid state drive) might change all that.

In this review, we'll be taking a look at the Startech InfoSafe SATA enclosure designed for 2.5" hard drives ... model S252U2ERR. This is one of the first external enclosure that can accommodate two 2.5" inch hard drives, supporting various RAID modes, as well as USB and eSATA connectivity. 

So who is Startech? The Startech is a US-based company that's fairly well-known worldwide. They've been around since 1985 making all sorts of accessories and peripherals for the PC market. These include things like USB/SATA accessories and devices, HDD enclosures, add-on PCI/PCIE cards and many more. For those who are not familiar with Startech or their products, here's a little blurb taken from their website ...

This little unit can fit into any 3.5" inch drive bay and could be ideal for users who require data protection (RAID 1) or high-speed data access (RAID 0). The 2.5" hard drive bays are removeble and can be locked using a special key. For connectivity, there's a hi-speed USB 2.0 (mini-USB) connection, that can give you a maximum data transfer rates of up to 480Mbps. There's also a eSATA connection, which has a maximum data transfer rates of up to 3Gbps. The whole unit is powered by an external power supply which is included.

This is one of the first Startech products we've tested. So we're hoping that this enclosure will have a few good selling points that will attract the users. What we're looking for are ... build quality, ease of use and of course, value. Can Startech give us what we need? 

Our test rig consists of an Intel Core i5 - 650 @ 3.2Ghz cooled by a Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 CPU cooler, a Gigabyte P55 USB3 motherboard, a Geforce GTX 460 OC, 4Gb Crucial Ballistix Tracer and a Adata HM 850W power supply. It's the same system we've used in our SSD tests.

OK, let's move on and check out the specifications of the Startech InfoSafe SATA external enclosure in our next page ...

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