What external hard drive case for a 1.5 gig SATA drive?

[IHateMyJob2004]

I am currently looking to get an external USB drive to backup my PC. My plan is to get a 1.5 TB SATA drive and an external enclosure. The external enclosures are shown here:
USB External Enclosures

The thing is, alot of these external enclosures have limitations of how big of a hard drive can go in them. So, can anyone recommend an enclosure for a 1.5TB drive? In terms of cost, I'm trying to keep things under $50 for the enclosure.

A co-worker said to avoid Rosewill, so I am at least following that advice.

As a side note, I plan on upgrading my PCs internal hard drive to 500, 750 or 1 TB. The external drive will be used for imaging the new drive and an older 120 gig (or so) hard drive in the same PC. I'm leaning towards a 500 or 750 drive for the PC simply because I want to keep two images on the backup drive at all times (the previous image and the current image along with incremental backups). With compression on the imaging software (True Image), I figure the 750+120 gig with 1.5 TB external backup should do the trick. I sitll might upgrade to a 500 gig internal just to be safe. Confused? summary:
1) Upgrading my PC to 500+120 GB or 750+120 GB. Maybe 1000+120GB but doubtful.
2) Want external backup mechanism via USB.

 

[MalVeauX]

Heya,

On a different approach to this question, why the 1.5tb drive? You can get very inexpensive 1tb externals that are very nice, not bulky, support USB and even have eSATA support for less money than buying a drive and a 3rd party enclosure for it. An example is the Fantom Drive series (it has a WD 1tb caviar in it). $100 with free shipping for a usb/esata 1tb drive already in a sleek enclosure.

And instead of an enclosure, look into a docking station. Basically a stand where you just drop the drive in, kinda like a memory card in a sense, and it connects and gets used that way. They even make them so that you can drop two drives in it at once. Very handy. Especially if all you're doing is connecting to backup some stuff and then switch it off and store. That's another option for you at least.

Then of course, there's what you're doing and how you use your drives that comes into play. For example, why have a single drive in your computer that does everything that needs to be completely imaged for backup? Why not have a smaller faster drive for your OS/applications and just image that one. And then have another drive, much larger and possibly slower, for storing things you use but don't actively use every second, like where you would store music, videos, etc, for example. Then just image your working drive for backups. And you can backup your media that you are storing on the other drive elsewhere or on optical media, etc. Also, this way, if you do need to restore a drive's image, you don't have to do so to the entire media collection; since it's just that one working drive with just your OS/apps. You get the benefit of not having to go external on anything for your media, but also, the benefit of your images being much smaller and so you can have several if need be.

Very best,

 

[IHateMyJob2004]

I want 1.5TB external so that I can upgrade to the largest possible drive internally (probably 750 GB for what I have planned.

I am not interested in performance that much. I basically want a backup system so that if a drive dies, I can simply grab the image and rebuild it. I don't want to go through re-installing everything.

I guess one plan is that I buy the 750GB model and migrate everything on it to the new 750 GB model and tossing the 120 GB all together.

Regardless, I want a full backup of my PC drives.

 

[IHateMyJob2004]

I suppose this might work:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16822148357

same thing at Best Buy is $20 more:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/ol...oduct&id=1218008110810

Update, this drive is a POS from everything I have read

 

[MalVeauX]

Heya,

And what happens if your external fails?

If you really want redundancy, or uptime, check out RAID5 or RAID6.
If you want backups, well, a single HDD backup of everything is a bad idea (it can be lost just as easily as your internal drive that you're planning on recovering from).

Or, go with that 1.5tb external and just hope it doesn't end up failing you when you actually need it. It's just as likely to fail as any internal, after all. And that seems to be what you're trying to have a fail safe against.

Very best,

 

[Old Hippie]

Antec MX-1 and any drive with a 5 yr. warranty.

I know the Antec will take a 1TB drive and probably a 1.5TB. Case manfgs. usually just advertise a drive capacitity limit of the largest avaliable drives and their advertising lags behind the drive sizes avaliable.

You're taking a chance with those premades if you purchase one with a short (1 or 2 yr.) warranty.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: MalVeauX
And what happens if your external fails?

If you really want redundancy, or uptime, check out RAID5 or RAID6.
If you want backups, well, a single HDD backup of everything is a bad idea (it can be lost just as easily as your internal drive that you're planning on recovering from).

If external fails, replace it and back up your internal again. A "backup" is an extra copy of something. If you're paranoid and the data is important enough, you would have multiple backups stored in multiple locations.

RAID5 and RAID6 protects data that has not yet been backed up. It won't protect against viruses, file system corruption or accidental deletion.

Back to the OP... theoretically any external drive bay that supports 48-bit LBA (which I hope is all of them these days) should support a 1.5TB drive.

I have this dual drive bay running two 1.5TB drives. Works fine. Takes a long time to initialize, but that's fine. Seems to stagger the spinup, and then waits until both drives are spinning before signaling Windows to detect them. Enclosure is shipped with the jumper set to JBOD, so you'd want to change jumper setting to normal. Fan is temperature controlled and is rather quiet for such a small thing, but it is annoying in certain circumstances in a really quiet room because when temperatures are borderline, the fan will spin up and spin down. Not the noise level, but the variance of the noise makes it irritating. I stuck on some rubber feet that I had, because the device doesn't come with any. This way it won't slide around. It is pretty much all aluminum unlike other aluminum enclosures that just has an aluminum shell and the HDD mounts to a plastic tray.

 

[jjmIII]

Originally posted by: IHateMyJob2004

Update, this drive is a POS from everything I have read

I have one in RMA as we speak