SABRENT Aluminum Ultra Slim USB 3.0 to 2.5-Inch SATA External

Ok, for the price, it's a really good case. First of all it's like a black anodized aluminum case, just big enough to fit the 2.5" drive. There is like a small rubber pad on the inside that seems to isolate it and hold it in place, nothing else holds it in place on the inside. The electronics plugs right into the sata interface on the drive, and is the other end of the case cover as well. It ships with 2 small screws and a small phillips driver which didn't work well, i used a slightly larger one i had at home and was able to screw it in tighter. Comes with a short usb 3.0 cable, the standard size on both size (rectanguler), plugged it into my laptop and at first nothing. But i forgot, it was from a ps4 so i had to go into the computer management and repartition the drive, and format it, then it worked fine as an external. It comes with with a vinyl like case to carry the drive around. So overall, it's sort of made cheap, but for the price, it's a great little case in my opinion. I noticed the the usb port was a little wonky as i almost plugged it in backwards (thought i broke the connector) but it's still working (tiny blue led shows disk access). Going to buy a few more of these for my extra drives i have sitting around, and the drive is powered by the usb cable as well, so couldn't be easier then that to add some storage to stuff like your tv, blu ray player, to store all the smart tv apps and things, or to your network router as a network drive. So far working well, and formatted as my F: drive. Update: Ok, assembled 4 of these so far. I did read that one person had problems with the circuit board touching the aluminum case. When you attach the drive, and insert it into the case, try both ways, flip it around, i always found that it fit better one way rather then other for whatever reason, but they all assembled fine. None of mine touched the case, BUT, if the 2 screws get loose, i can see the small soldered ends possibly can touch. So what i did, was the cases come packed with like this black foam, i cut just a super thin layer of it, to cover the ends and just shoved it on top, i'll see if i can take a pic and post it, but it's just the foam, i just pushed it on there, super thin layer lol. So far though, i have one on my ps4 pro, i have one on my network router, i'm using one as a small backup for my laptop, these are great so far. using 3 2.5" drives, 2 standard, 1 ssd, 1 hybrid, they all work fine.

This is my 3rd Sabrent SATA External Aluminum Enclosure. I can't even remember how long I've had the first two, but I know that I can depend on them to work anytime, any place, and on any PC with an open USB port. Buying a Sabrent enclosure is a no-brainer. Want it to work? Buy this one! Now there are more options than ever so I'm sure you can find one to suit your needs. Think long - Think wrong when shopping for your next external enclosure. Regardless, I will remain a faithful customer.

I purchased this enclosure so I could continue to use the (recently upgraded to SSD) HDD from my PS4 Pro as an external expansion drive. It’s doing exactly that... and doing well at its job. I have but two caveats. I purchased this enclosure specifically because it was aluminum. But one of the two screw holes was not tapped correctly, and the matching screw hole for the plastic end cap does not align well with it. Unfortunately this results in being unable to completely tighten the off screw and close the end cap flush. (See pic) Also, I wish they had included some form of foam insert for the top or bottom of the drive enclosure. The tolerances are somewhat loose, and the HDD rattled around a bit inside of the enclosure. A thin foam insert that I double taped to the HDD did the trick, but it would be nice if they had thought of this. Especially given the somewhat fragile nature of HDDs regarding shock. Overall though, I’m happy with the purchase. It does its job, it does it well, it just doesn’t look or sound as pretty as it it could while doing it.

yep! Excellent case!!! VERY snug inside the case and then the case goes into this rubber padded sheatch and fit tight as a glove! I like it so much that I bought two because the first once I got at a discount or free was so nice I had to have another one. They are VERY nice and much like the same thing Lacie sells (usually orange) they provide shock absorption, a tight fit, bumper protection in case of a drop etc. I couldn't be happier. I put on 750GB 7200 Sata 2.5" hard drive in each one. One wil music and movies and the other with all my PC and Mac installs etc. I work in IT so it's awesome to have large portable USB powered devices for transferring tons of GB of files and the one with movies is hooked to my AC wireless router and will act as a DLNA device so I can stream movies to it with computer totally off and it's well protected against heat and shock since it's encased in rubber. Tons of uses but the bittgest is protection on the go and when you drop or bang it around in your tech bag it's well protected. The drive enclosures are USB 3.0 so a nice fast read and write is a boneus touch for the enclosure plus the rubber protection couldn't maker a better combo. You do NOT get a drive with this of course, you just get a 2.5" sata hard drive enclosure and the rubber sheath and a usb 3.0 cable all white. I'd recommend a 7200 RPM drive or SSD to compliment the USB 3.0 data speeds of the enclosure and you'll have one fast little external harddrive indeed!! Can't say enough good about it. Fit TIGHT too!! LOVE this thing, I now have three lol. I ordered another one today for my 1TB SSD that came yesterday lol. ONE thing I should mention...some drives that are very skinny like 7 and 9mm fir a TINY bit loose in the enclosure and can jiggle around (VERY little) but still it's possible so whet I did was simply get a small piece of two sided heat tape or black masking take and mage a little two sided roll of it and stuck it to the drive then slid it in before I screwed the drive into the enclosure to keep it from wiggling. But most 2.5" drives won't do that because 99.9% of the time they're a prefect fit thickness wise. :-)

***Been using this for nearly 2 months now and not much has changed. Works ALMOST without issue. The only problem I've encountered thus far is occasionally the unit isnt recognized by my xbox one. I've worked out through process of elimination this only happens when my xbox loses power and the fix is simple enough and only requires unplugging and plugging it back into the console. Havent had any data loss or read issues with the enclosure, and as far as Im concerned its worth the money and a great deal at that. I would recommend this for sure to anyone in need of such a device. I can also confirm that this does work with my gaming console which was a concern when purchasing this because Id read some reviews saying they couldnt get it to work with their xbox or playstations. So far so good. Installed a 1tb hdd in this 2 days ago and have been installing games through my xbox one the entire two days. Dont think its the enclosures fault that its taking so long because installing to the internal hdd is just as slow. Seems to be working fine and haven't had any issues over the past two days with transfers stopping or encountering errors or anything along those lines. I will update this review if anything changes but for right now this seems like a solid product. While reading some reviews folks mentioned that the circuit board was touching the metal on the case and causing shorts and data loss, but the version I got seems to have addressed the problem by covering the back of the circuit board thats exposed, thus solving any potential issues that may have caused the issue in the past for other customers.

For the price it's excellent! Seems great so far! Very small, easy to use, fast 3.0 USB speed, good cooling, awesome! The construction does feel cheap and it's got sharpish edges but I can't complain for the price of $12.99. It also doesn't have any rubber feet or vibration dampening but surprisingly it's not loud. The speed blew me away! With a normal 1TB laptop hard drive installed in it, it's faster than this drive: http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00E83X9P8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Browsing my files on it is almost as fast as browsing the files in my internal hard drive. I can watch Full HD videos directly off it with almost no loading time. It's literally just like using your internal hard drive! Transferring about 400GB worth of videos and pictures took a little under 2 hours. Which is not bad at all in my opinion. So basically the hard drive in my laptop was failing so I bought a 2TB hard drive and this external enclosure. I took the dying hard drive out and put it in the enclosure and installed the new drive in my computer. I then installed Windows using the installation disks. After I had installed all the drivers and stuff like that I used the old drive in the enclosure to put all my files on my new hard drive. It worked seamlessly. It's also nice that the drive uses a normal USB plug instead of some odd USB 3.0 micro-B. That way you could use an extension or use a different cord that's easy to find. I think you could technically plug it into a phone... not sure it could supply enough current though. I'll have to try that. All in all great product.

A couple years ago, I purchased brand new ASUS laptop, and not a cheap one at that. The only issue was the hard drive; it was SLOW. Angry at how a new laptop could feel so sluggish, I opted to purchase a 250GB Samsung EVO SSD, which had come down in price. The only downside was that I had a quarter of the storage (though I never use too much). I also now had a brand new 1 TB hard drive leftover. I saw this product by Sabrent on Amazon, and immediately purchased it after carefully reviewing other similar products. Now I have a fully functioning spare usb portable hard drive, at a fraction of the cost of one you would by directly. Here are my impressions: Build/Quality: 10/10, 5 stars, can't get better. The brushed aluminum feel is incredible in the hand, has held up well to scratches, and looks great. The hard drive is plugged into a SATA to female USB adapter, which is locked into the enclosure by 2 screws. The hard drive is a snug but appropriate fit, so I know my hard drive is safe and protected inside. You could never tell that this was an enclosure. Functionality: 10/10, again, this was so easy to install (and oddly satisfying). The speed of this drive is dependent on the actual hard drive (this is, again, just an enclosure), but from the case's end, you will NOT be limited. The connection is USB 3.0 and SATA III, so you will get the max speed of any drive you put in it. It works well even with the slow, cheap 5400 RPM drive I installed. Again, if you retire a laptop, or upgrade to a larger or faster HDD/SSD, please don't waste you old hard drive. Use this enclosure, and give it a new life as a portable hard drive! Depending on your hard drive, you will end up with a product just as good if not better than more expensive portable drives you buy off the shelf.

This Sabrent Ultra Slim USB 3.0 to 2.5-Inch SATA External Aluminum Hard Drive Enclosure, in sleek metallic black, is just what the doctor ordered for me, as I turned my old laptop HDD into an awesome external HDD for all my plug and play adventures. It uses the superior speedy USB 3.0 connection offering up file transfers at a lightning fast 5gbps (USB 3.0 cables and slots are colored blue FYI), and of course is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 connections but with the loss of the 3.0 speed. The enclosure case is compatible with any 2.5" SATA HDDs, and would be great for converting old laptop HDDs and turning them into a portable external HDD by using this enclosure with it. The case is made out of a seriously sexy black aluminum construction, which helps prevent your HDD from overheating by allowing the heat it generates to dissipate effeciently. Did I also mention I love it's sleek, brushed black metallic vibe? This is great for backing up personal files or having all your movies to bring with you wherever you go! It boasts a nifty 5gbps file transfer rate if connected to a USB 3.0 port (Blue!), and a much slower 480mbps if you have to connect it to a USB 2.0 port. It also has a LED light on the case indicating when there is power and HDD activity. The case comes with a USB 3.0 cable, so no worries there. Finally, you can own this super slim beauty for the low price of $8.99, and is also Prime eligible. Two thumbs up from me Sabrenet!

Nickel, rien à redire

Was looking for an inexpensive aluminium case (heat transfer) that was still well made. Quite pleased. Nicely finished case with good fit. My SSD slid in easily and connected to the front panel seamlessly, took maybe 30 seconds. USB cable seems sturdy and transfer speeds are acceptable. I would buy another.

Once in a while you get hold of a product that surpasses expectations and this device is one of them from my perspective. I had some spare SSDs laying around doing nothing from other upgrades and I decided to take a punt on a Sarbrent USB3 black external device to mount my SSDs externally. Having read other reviews on amazon I realised that quite a lot of the negative reviews were non-tech savvy folks who were either expecting too much from old SSDs or are not getting the performance they expected because of USB3 implementations that don't support UASP (USB attached SCSI protocol). UASP succeeds USB mass storage bulk-only transport (BOT) protocol and has a number of requirements such as: 1. OS is at least Windows 8 2. a motherboard that supports the Intel Platform Controller Hub (PCH) with UASP support (that to complicate matters is a licenced feature so not all motherboard manufacturers implement / enable the feature!). 3. not all usb ports are equal as their paths go to hubs on the motherboard that are not all the same technology, some may be labled SS (super speed) for example and others not so. The simplest method is to plug the usb device into a couple of ports until you see the device appear in device manager as a JMicron SCSI Disk Device. If you really want to see if UASP is in use you can then open the properties dialog and click the Details tab. From there select Property -> Device stack and see that '\Driver\UASPStor' is listed. This will show that UASP is in use for this device. Generally if you can see this then you are good to get the maximum speed you can. For me I'm getting a little over 350MB/s sequential I/O reading from an older OCZ Vertex 3 SSD in the Serbrent to a newer Samsung device on the SATA 3 bus. Obviously the OCZ is the limiting factor for me and the device is 100% busy whereas the newer Samsung is only ~40% busy writing the data. Other things to note: * now you're not going to get close to native sata3 (6GB/s speeds) for random I/O although USB3 at full bandwidth will get close for sequential I/O like copying a large movie for example. * I quote windows and Intel above as these are what I have tried myself however I'm sure Linux may have a kernel that supports the feature by now and I'd be surprised if AMD don't have a similar supported implementation on their motherboards. so you'd need to check. Quality aspects: I feel the company has done very well for the price point for the physical quality of this enclosure. It comes in good packaging that's not too wasteful, you get a cloth bag (I guess this could be useful to avoid scratches while travelling) and I really like the compact design - this device is not much more bulky than the SSD itself! Some people complain that the alloy is thin but to me that's the point of having alloy vs plastic isn't it? You get a nice thin compact surround that is plenty strong enough once the SSD is mounted inside. Yes the screws are small and the ends are plastic, and this is a cheap external device so in my opinion the quality good enough for most uses unless you're planning to throw this off a cliff... The device itself is a good quality aluminium (mine is black) and all the cables are good quality. Its also worth noting that the device is bus powered so older laptop spinning disks may draw more power so you want to be careful if you are planning to add a whole bunch of these on an external hub that's not powered. My only gripe is the sticky label that's stuck to the aluminium on the outside of the body. This takes a bit of work to remove and clean. It would be a nicer finish if the company solved this issue or avoided including the small paper coded label entirely (I expect this is for a robotic manufacturing / tracking process but this just spoils the aesthetic for me when the company obviously went through pains getting the look and feel right just to spoil it with a minor detail, anyway I'm nit picking). So that wraps up my review. Hope this is of use to someone. I use an Intel Nuc btw and this is great for adding external silent, quick storage to the Nuc.

works well. the one i received came with insulating foam over the diodes that were an issue for some reviewers. a few notes if i was being nitpicky: nothing holds my 7mm drive in place vertically save the sata ports. a 9mm spacer also did not fit snugly and would rattle around. horizontally there's thick foam that fits the drive snug. no rubber feet so the enclosure slides around too easily. the drive is inserted from the front/back and not the top/bottom. the latter would have allowed for thermal pads for better heat transfer.

Appears to be a good solid product. No problems with installing a ssd. Working well so far.