I've had my share of enclosure failures but all of them by the low-priced enclosures.
The OWC "Elite Pro" enclosures run about $70-85 apiece (see MacSales.com for details) and are very very reliable. Not one has ever failed me; between my brother and I, we've been using them for fifteen-eighteen years. My current ones for 3.5" drives support three hardware protocols in their latest revisions (eSATA, FW800, and USB3). They're very fast enclosures too. USB3 seems the most cost effective speed for the money at the present; I have two Thunderbolt SSD drives that are faster still but they're still double the price for the capacity, at least. Meanwhile, drives get full and/or flakey every few years of use. I've swapped and upgraded drives periodically; each of my enclosures has likely hosted up to three drives by now: no signs of failure yet. Bare drives are pretty cheap these days for 2, 3, or 4 TB. G > On Jul 2, 2017, at 10:42 AM, Mark Roberts <[email protected]> wrote: > > Mark C wrote: > >> Rick - >> >> Don't know Macs but my experience has been that housings are far more >> likely to fail than the hard drive in them. You are probably planning to >> do this anyhow - but it if you are replacing the drive it would be >> worthwhile to check the hard drive with another housing. > > The symptoms Rick is describing sound more like hard drive failure > than housing failure. But as an external housing costs about 20 bucks > these days it's worth a try. > > I've been having trouble with my backup (external) hard drive for > months now. Sometimes it wouldn't be recognized by the desktop > computer at all powering the drive housing on and off a couple of > times would sort it out eventually. It seemed like a housing issue > and, in any case, I thought housings are cheap enough to test that > idea first. I ordered a new USB3 external housing for $22.95 a couple > of weeks ago and it not only solved the problem but made my backups > *much* faster (I'd been using a USB2 drive housing in a USB3 port on > the computer). -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
