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Best Choice For Hard Drive Enclosure?

1

10th Doctor

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 2, 2010
8
0
I need to remove the hard drive from my dead 2008 MacBook (it appears to have been a fried logic board) and I've been looking around for the right enclosure.

I want something durable and relatively easy to travel with. I already have a hefty external desktop HD, and I was sort of hoping for a more portable enclosure this time around.

Has anyone had a good experiences with a particular brand? Any recommendations? Longevity is a major plus! I don't want to buy anything that will fail in two months time...

Anyway, any help is appreciated.
 
I've only ever used one hard drive enclosure, which I bought because it was pretty cheap and had good reviews on Newegg at the time. I bought it when I upgraded the hard drive in my 2009 MBP a year and a half ago.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182140

I had a 320GB 5400 RPM drive that I swapped out for a 750GB 7200 RPM drive. By buying this enclosure, I also got a $15 320GB external hard drive out of the deal (by putting my old hard drive into it).

It's held up nicely and is pretty durable because its made of aluminum. Taking it apart is easy! You press the two buttons (one on each side) and it slides apart into 4 pieces: Top lid, bottom lid, center tray that holds the logic board, and the logic board. There are two screws that hold your hard drive to the logic board. It even comes with a little phillips screw driver to use with the screws.

It's worked well for me. What's nice about it being so easy to take apart is that I've actually helped a friend recover files off of her laptop whose display stopped working. I just popped her hard drive into it, and backed up the files onto another computer.

Again I'll say that I've never used any other enclosures, and you'd probably want to look into something with USB 3.0 ports since that will give you faster transfer rates, but this one has worked well for me.

Also, since I don't know how tech savvy you are, but according to this, your laptop has a SATA hard drive in it. Be sure to get one that says "SATA to *something*" and not "IDE to *something*" or you won't be able to plug your hard drive into it.
http://support.apple.com/kb/SP5
 
Ah! thank you for your reply! I seemed to have forgotten to subscribe to my own thread, so I didn't receive any notifications. I'm glad I checked back...

I've heard good things about the Rosewill brand. I'm definitely adding them to the list of considerations.

I'm no noob, but as quite tech savvy as most here. That being said, I had done all my research and knew I was looking for an enclosure for a 2.5" SATA drive. I've watched a couple tutorial videos on removal and installation, so I do have a sense of what I'm doing.

Thanks again for the recommendation!
 
Check out OtherWorldComputing
They aren't the cheapest, but their enclosures are high quality and have a nice style.

macsales.com
 
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i think so,I second Panch0's recommendation, OWC has terrific enclosures.thanks
14C4PD7
 
I have many external enclosures and yes, some from OWC and they (OWC offerings) have worked quite well for me.

One thing I do suggest, make sure you get an enclosure that has at least USB3 in additional to FW 800/400 even if the latter is all you would connect with for now. This will make sure it is usable for the next couple of years as FW seems to be sadly falling by the side on some newer model machines. This also avoids having to get adapters for FW to ... (Thunderbolt as example).

Just more peanuts from the gallery.
 
By group consensus.. I'm going with OWC's "Mercury On-The-Go" enclosure. Thanks everyone! Honestly, I feel much better having had some guidence to go on.
 
And check if it can handle drives larger than 2.2TB. The latest annoying "year-2000-like bug".
 
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