I am somewhat of a noob at this and am looking for advice on a specific enclosure feature.
I am trying to find an enclosure that will power down or sleep when the host system is asleep.

Let me explain: I bought one of these WD external drives: Link
I use this external drive to write a mirror of my Thinkpad C drive in real time (using this nifty software called MirrorFolder )
One of the features I like about this WD drive is that I can sleep my Thinkpad and walk away and about 10 minutes later the external WD drive will power down into some kind of sleep mode (the whirring noise completely stops). When I wake the Thinkpad up then the external drive wakes up. This happens automatically.

Anyway… I am looking for an external housing that will give me this kind of sleep feature. I have bought a couple of internal Seagate mechanisms from Fry’s and the enclosures I have purchased (ADSTech and come other brand) keep the disk spinning night and day unless I physically switch them off.

Any ideas if there is an external enclosure with this sleep feature?
Is there some spec I should be looking for?
Thanks in advance.

MikeDLA said:I am looking for an external housing that will give me this kind of sleep feature. I have bought a couple of internal Seagate mechanisms from Fry’s and the enclosures I have purchased (ADSTech and come other brand) keep the disk spinning night and day unless I physically switch them off.

It's hard to tell if your problem is with your computer settings or the drives or the enclosures. All the enclosures I listed earlier properly sleep the drive, so look at those brands. Also, check the power settings on your laptop and make sure they are set correctly.

kknd1967 said:Something I just learned recently: power supply may also be an issue for high speed DVD burners, who may require higher power than the power supply can provide consistently.

The same problem occurs with large hard drives placed in enclosures. Sometimes, the power brick that was originally included with an enclosure can only handle powering a drive that is 250GB, for example, but when you try to use a 400GB drive or larger, it can't power it up. Getting a replacement brick is usually the solution for 2.5" or 3.5" enclosures. For 5.25" enclosures, that may not work, because the power source is often built-in to the case. In those situations, you have to exchange it for another enclosure.

I found another Oxford/Cypress combo enclosure:

Kingwin KH-350UF-S

Is anyone using this one? It's fanless and all-aluminum, but the drawback is that it doesn't seem to have any ventilation holes, which means it gets hotter than most. Because of that, I can't recommend it.

The recommended enclosures list has been moved and updated in the quick summary section. There are separate sections for each type of drive. Please make sure to add any new drives in the appropriate section and don't forget to include chipset and interface information. Thanks.

For a internal HDD that already has data on it, is it possible to convert it an External USB and preserving the pre-existing data.

Or do I need to format?


I have a Hitachi 250GB internal HDD with a bunch of movies that will be transferred to another computer as an external HDD, and I am just curious whether I should format the HDD first (and backup all the movies), or just give it a go.

The following thread carries information about REBATE FRAUD on the part of Bytecc, a vendor of cheap external enclosures:

Bytecc Enclosure Rebates

Because of the serious nature of this issue, Bytecc products should be banned from even being considered as recommended enclosures.

Hi, excellent forum here... I'm quickly picking up how to put together an external hard drive.

I recently bought the AMS Venus DS-2316CBK enclosure for a new 250 gb HDD, 7200 RPM. My question regards compatibility, formatting, and partitioning. I would like to swap the drive between my laptop (XP) and my desktop (98) and have read the manuf specifications for 98SE or higher. Is this because of the NTFS limitations on older OS? Or is the requirement just for the purpose of formatting the HDD? (if so, I could format using my XP laptop) Is there anyway to work around this, or will I have to upgrade my desktop to 98SE to use the HDD?

Also, if I do upgrade to 98SE, what kind of formatting and partitioning should I consider to use the drive between both systems?

I really don't want to limit the capabilities/capacity of this external drive, so if there is a downside, I'll just use it solely with my laptop.

In any case, what kind of partitioning is recommended for a drive of this size?

Thank you

Question about power-saving modes on external enclosures...

Will a drive in an external enclosure sleep (stop spinning) if it hasn't been accessed in xxx minutes? I currently have 4 internal IDE drives in my built system and the spindles that are not being accessed for 30 minutes or so will power down. I would like to add an external drive to my system if someone can tell me that when it's not being used, it can stop.

I plan on making it a backup drive that will only run (scheduled) at 2:00am. My machine wakes itself up and starts backing up. So, really the drive is wasting away spinning at any other time! Please don't suggest that I use the hard power switch- I'm NOT going to wake up at 2:00am and turn the switch on!

Help please.

OP, can you remove the enclosure recommendations from the end of your first post since the list in the quick summary is more up-to-date and accurate. Thanks.