Bytecc Aluminium Mobile Enclosure

Provided by: Bytecc
Retail: Est. $45.00
Review Date: October 19th, 2003
Written By: James S.

Always wanted more hard drive space but thought it would require a lot of work? Of course you did. Having to unscrew case, open it up, mess with the wires, find an available IDE cable, and hoping you can mount it into the case right, is too much trouble for even the biggest of hardware nuts.

Well how about just having to plug in two cords and a quick format to add any size of hard drive? Sound to good and easy to be true? Well that’s what I’m here to find out for you. Today I will be reviewing the BYTECC 3.5’ Aluminium Mobile Enclosure, model ME-350U2.

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I must admit I’ve always been weary of external enclosures ever since my misfortunes with an old USB1.1 20gig hard drive. Ever since then I haven’t been able to deal with anything less than 7200 rpm internal hard drives. The drive I’m going to be putting into the enclosure is a 160gig 7200rpm 2mb cache Samsung hard drive. Not a big top of the line performer in this day of 10k raptors and raid 0 setups, but fast enough to use as a storage drive for files or a network used for file access so as not to affect your internal drives.

Packaging:

As the box states the enclosure supports hard drives up to 300gigs which is more than enough for almost anyone. There are different types of options available for connections but this hard drive enclosure is a USB2.0 only version.

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Bytecc's hard drive enclosure includes everything needed to hook the hard drive into the enclosure and then to the computer. The instructions are fairly detailed and the cd not only has drivers for win98se machines but text files that will inform you how to format your new hard drive for all operating systems.

Installation:

The installation of the hard drive into the enclosure is a simple process.

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First, the drive is hooked to the IDE to USB converter.

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