(e-mail address removed) wrote
I havent bothered to keep track of them, just aware that some have
said that their fan cooled enclosure does work very well and keeps
the drive nice and cool. It aint rocket science, the problem appears
to be that far too many care more about appearance than keeping
the drive cool and dont bother with a decent fan etc.
Its harder to keep the drive cool without a fan, but it can be
done, particularly with the cooler running drives like Samsungs.
I also prefer the separate enclosure approach over the packaged
external drives, basically because none of the packaged drives
have more than a 1 year warranty and I prefer to retain the full
3 or 5 year warranty that the drive itself has. Its usually
cheaper to buy a decent external housing separately too.
Include enclosure types too.
Lot to be said for eSATA because that gives you the full speed
of an internal drive and the SMART stuff is trivial with those.
Not quite as convenient cabling wise, but thats not a big enough
consideration to matter IMO. And you can get some very decent
SATA port multipliers too so you can have multiple drives in a
decently fan cooled box and thats more mechanically convenient
too if you need more than one external drive.
I basically go the NAS route myself, gives even more flexibility.