SABRENT Enclosure for 2.5” and 3.5” Internal SATA Hard Drives

This SATA HDD enclosure is perfect. I pulled it out of the box, pressed the single button to open the outer case, slipped in my 3.5" HDD, closed up the case, plugged in the USB cable, booted up the computer, and VOILA! The drive was instantly recognized and worked like a charm. I tried it with some smaller SATA drives and it also worked flawlessly. Because I was merely transferring data from old drives, I didn't bother screwing the drives into the enclosure. However, if you wish to do so (and I highly recommend that you do if you will be transporting this), there are screws and a screwdriver provided in the box. Sabrent couldn't have made this enclosure any easier! It's the best HDD enclosure I have owned (and I have had a number of different variations over the years). No more dodgy HDD toasters for me.

I bought the Sabrent ED-DFLT enclosure so that I could format various hard drives on my iMac. It's a rather long story, which I'll shorten to this: I confirmed that the Sabrent enclosure worked when I received it by using an old 2TB drive. I then tossed the box and waited for my 6TB Western Digital Caviar Green drive to arrive from Amazon a couple of weeks later. When plopped into the Sabrent, the new drive showed up on my Mac's desktop. I then set about creating a large encrypted disk image on the drive. It chugged away for 4 full days, seemingly working for the first 3. But after day 4, the formatting was clearly hung, and it had taken my Mac down with it. Upon rebooting, the drive no longer showed up at all. Disk Utility could not even see it. After a lot of detective work, too long to describe here, I confirmed that the 6TB drive was still working fine, but the Sabrent logic board had died, obviously a case of infant mortality. The good news: it can handle large capacity hard drives. The bad news: not for very long... And of course, since I tossed the boxing, there is no returning the Sabrent. I therefore spent $23 on a brick, although it won't break me. This case of infant mortality is probably just a fluke, but an annoying one when it happens to you. I should have kept the box a while longer. My bad. UPDATE 1/2118: To Sabrent's great credit, and this is going back about 2.5 years ago, they stepped in and replaced the enclosure, no charge. I tested it but ran into issues trying to do the above formatting again, and threw it on my junk pile. With hindsight, I'm now realizing that the issue was most likely the hard drive I was using, which I got by ripping open a Western Digital external hard drive and removing it. There's something odd about the firmware in these drives. They're just "not right" when taken out of their manufacturer's shell and fully exposed like this. I think my issue was the hard drive, and NOT Sabrent. Coupled with their excellent customer service, I've now increased the rating to five stars. Because ... I just bought some 8TB Hitachi hard drives and it was time to format them, again with encryption. These are new, bare hard drives from Amazon, not something I ripped out of an external HD box! Fortunately, I still had the Sabrent enclosure, so I pulled one off the pile, attached the 12V/1.5A power adapter to it, put the 8TB drive in, connected to my Mac Mini, and just like that, the hard drive mounted on the desktop. I formatted it in HFS+, then created a new encrypted disk image, and let it run. This time, all went well. I discovered that if you open Sierra's Activity Monitor and click on Disk Activity, you get a readout of how fast the data is moving across the interface. I was seeing it move between 110 - 160 MB/sec, averaging about 130 MB/sec. That's not bad at all on my 2012 iMac with a 4-core i7 processor running Sierra (12.6). It's not the fastest i7 there is, so you have to remember that there are calculations that first have to be made before the data can be spit out of the USB3 ports for writing. That takes time to execute, which has to slow transfers down somewhat. USB of any speed never hits its theoretical maximum anyway (4.8Gbps for USB3, or about 600 MB/sec). Considering I was getting only 25 MB/sec with USB2 on this same machine (theoretical maximum speed = 60 MB/sec), actual speeds are less than theoretical speeds by about the same factor for each version of USB. The full 8TB of writing took 17 hours, which averages out to 130 MB/sec, consistent with what I see in Activity Monitor. I would say that's pretty good. I'm happy. Side note: I got to wondering about Sabrent's advice to run a firmware update. I'm a Mac guy, but I have an old PC running XP. I thought I would take a stab at the upgrade. I downloaded it to the PC, but the update would not run at all. You tell it to RUN the update and nothing happens. My neighbor has a PC running Windows 10, so I took the dock, power supply, and a USB cable to his place. He downloaded the update to his PC, followed the .pdf instructions exactly, the interface presented is NOT what the .pdf shows, but tried running it anyway. Same issue: hit the RUN button and nothing happens. It doesn't freeze or anything like that. It simply does nothing. So much for that! The key point I'm making is that this same dock that I bought 2.5 years ago (August 2015) easily sees my 8TB drives, runs flawlessly, and runs quite fast, all with no firmware update whatsoever. I don't understand Sabrent's statement that older docks (2.5 years old?) without an update are limited to 4TB. Not mine! I do not understand why other commenters can't get it to work right. It works perfectly for me. Considering Sabrent's great customer support, excellent USB3 performance, full support for an 8TB drive, and it's very low price, I gotta give it 5 stars! UPDATE 1/30/2018: Plugging into two different iMacs running Snow Leopard (10.6.8), neither can see any drive plugged into it. Odd, since at one time it could/did. I don't know what the difference is, but if you're running Snow Leopard, you might consider passing on the Sabrent. UPDATE 2/12/2018: Okay, so the Sabrent isn't happy with Snow Leopard. Separately, I plugged the Sabrent into my 2012 Mac Mini w/i7 processor and running Sierra (12.6). I plugged a second, different external USB3 drive enclosure to another port, loaded a pair of 8TB X300 Toshiba hard drives in each, and proceeded to move data from one drive to the other. Measured speed is about 130 MB/sec, which is about max transfer rates that these hard drives can deliver. No complaints!

Works as described and is easy to use.

Works well, wires are long enough, and the case is nice. Wish there was an option to turn off the LED light though

Works perfect. Simple plug and play. All necessary cables were included.

Excellent choice to save hours upson hours of work so I didn't have to open up a computer and try to mount it inside a computer. It just works.

I had an external Seagate drive stop powering on. I did everything I could think of to get it to power up again, had some stuff on it I didn't want to lose. As a laast ditch effort I got this Sabrent enclosure and busted the Seagate hard drive out of it's enclosure. This Sabrent enclosure worked! What a relief! Very worthwhile purchase.

I bought this Sabrent enclosure to use with a 20TB Western Digital Ultrastar drive for large backups. Setup was simple and the drive was recognized right away. When I tried running a ~7TB backup with Restic, it would run for about 15 hours before failing. Windows Event Viewer logged this error: "The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Failure status: {Drive Not Ready}..." This usually means the drive connection dropped. In the error details, the device manufacturer was listed as Sabrent, so it points toward the enclosure’s USB-to-SATA bridge. After that, I removed the drive and connected it directly to my PC’s SATA port and it completed a 23-hour CHKDSK with zero bad sectors and has worked perfectly since. I also noticed the drive was running quite hot inside the enclosure during the backup, much warmer than when installed in my PC. That makes me wonder if heat buildup, power delivery, or the USB bridge itself was the issue. I’m not 100% sure (maybe my unit was defective) but it struggled with long, sustained transfers. For smaller backups of a few hundred gigabytes, it worked fine, so it might be fine for lighter workloads or smaller drives. But in hindsight, I probably should have spent more on a higher-quality enclosure with better cooling and a more robust controller, especially for an enterprise-class HDD. Pros: - Simple installation - Works well for small backups - Drive recognized without extra setup Cons: - In my case, failed during long backups on a large drive - Drive temperature got unusually high inside the enclosure - May not be ideal for enterprise drives or heavy workloads If you’re backing up multiple terabytes at a time, consider investing in a more expensive enclosure that’s built to handle it (maybe... I haven't actually done this yet)? For casual, light use, this one should be fine so I am giving it 3 stars.

The docking station worked seamlessly with both my computer and the old drive I was externally connecting. It was very straightforward to install the hard drive in the dock, and I was easily able to fully back up 2 TB of data. The enclosure is sturdy, and I like the transparent cover as it allows me to easily see the drive that's inserted. Overall I am very pleased with this product as it performs as advertised and at a reasonable price point.

システムのバックアップには最適です。排熱も問題ないと思いますが、最近は気温が高いのでそのへんは各自調整していくのが良いでしょう。なにより、引っ越しソフトウェアがダウンロード可能なのが良好。使いながらレビュー追加していきます。

Excellent drive bay

To connect old drives to extract old data back. 3.5 and 2.5 drives are not an issue

Working as expected, supports hot swapping on Windows and Linux. Recommended at this price level.