It seems the more storage we get the more storage we need, whether it is for arching essential information, keeping a backup of our data, storing photographs and videos, or just to get data from one place to another quickly. Fortunately, transferring large amounts data is made easier these days by portable drives.

The silver 2.5” eSATA & USB 2.0 SATA Drive Enclosure from StarTech (SAT2510U2E) is one particular portable enclosure I got to have a good look at recently.

Image Source: StarTech 

An enclosure is a specially designed case with its own interface circuitry which allows you to add your own hard drive. This particular enclosure is light and cool to touch, a benefit of the aluminium construction of the enclosure itself which also helps to dissipate heat generated by the installed drive. The stated speeds of the enclosure interface are up to 480Mbps using USB 2.0 and up to a whopping 3Gbps using eSATA. The enclosure supports both 2.5” SATA type I (SATA/150) and type II drives (SATA/300). The operating systems supported are Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Mac OS 10 and higher. The unit requires no bulky external power supply as it can be powered using a suitable USB connection using a supplied USB to DC adaptor cable.

The particular enclosure I looked at was also matched with a 160GB 2.5” Hard Drive from Western Digital allowing me to transfer over 100GB of data quickly and when paired with encryption software, such as Truecrypt, the unit provides a useful mechanism for transferring data whilst ensuring the contents of the hard drive remains safe from prying eyes.