Coolmax HD-389-U2 3.5Inch Sata External Encl with USB2.0 Connection

i bought this external drive box kind of blind. my only experience with external drive boxes have been with boxes which had internal fans - hence lots of room inside. this one of course doesn't have one. fortunately, i am using it with one of western digital's green drives. it is really kind of hoaky to hook up as the drive is just about the same size as the box, not exactly the same size however. i used the drive screws that you normally use to connect the drive to the drive bay as spacers to give me a tight fit in the little box - it seems to work just fine. the drive connections plugged easily into the end-plate of the box. but then, i had trouble with the end-plate connection to the rest of the box. there are two tiny-tiny screws which secure the end-plate and i wound up stripping one of them before it was completely in. the other screw worked fine, and the end-plate seems to be firmly connected regardless of the one imperfect screw job. when i hooked the unit up to my computer it came up fine and has been working fine since. i have seen speeds on the order of 30 megabytes on large data transfers which is fine for my purposes. the box gets warm, but is always cool enough to handle comfortably. definitely worth the [...] bucks i paid for it.

My first time buying such an item. My PC had crashed, but the hard drive was thought to be good. Read some about how to easily convert your HD to a an external HD. Received it fast and the item was very economical. It worked great. I would have gave this 5 stars, but the written inustructions after you hook up your harddrive was lacking. I ended up googling what to do next, and found several answers. I highly recommend, but if you are trying to recover your lost data, you will have to research how to do, especially if your old stuff was password protected. In the end I had 100% success for less than $15.

I have some IDE hard drives hanging around here, so I ordered 2 IDE enclosures. Shipping was OK, box was ok, it works fine, but I ORDERED I D E. and they shipped two SATA. I used one of them, it works fine, but being an old time PC user, I have IDE hard drives layin' around here. It was not worth the trouble shipping them back and SATA will be here a little longer.Maybe I'll find IDE at some hamfest. I don't feel like trusting them to reorder.

I love this case, it saved me a lot of money, since i had an spare 500gb sata hard drive with no use. I decided to give a try with an external usb media player, worked as advertised, watched a couple of movies. Worked with a W!! that i use to play games, excellent response (if you know what are you doing). I Decided to give it a try with a wireless router that has an USB port for connecting extenal hard drives, printers, etcetera. Plugged it for 2 days to the router, everything fine. The third day this thing was hot, i mean the metal case you may use it for keeping your coffee hot for a long period, it almost burned my fingers. This made me go back to my science classes in high school. Now i use it only when it is neccesary (moving large files from my house to my friends houses, flash backups etcetera. The desing is cool, easy to install, it seens durable, except for the switch and the power supply connector. It comes in a nice package. It looks expensive, but is realy cheap.

In a nutshell: I really have liked and bought many products from CoolMax in the past. I can not do so with this product. Here is why:The Good:1. The unit is made to handle 3.5" internal disk drives.2. The power cable is very nice and flexible.3. The USB cable is a bit short but is usable.4. The case looks really nice.The Bad:1. The unit overheats easily because of the design. This is because:1a. There aren't any ventilation slots in the unit so the heat is trapped inside of it.1b. There is no tolerance at either end to allow for cracks so heat can escape the unit.1c. The dimensions of the unit is such that there is less than 1/4 of an inch around the disk drive once it is inserted into the case. On the bottom the disk drive is pulled completely up against the side of the case by the four screws you are supposed to use to hold the disk drive in place. This means there is zero amount of space between the hot disk drive and the side of the case thus trapping the heat there.1d. The unit will turn itself off if not used for a given length of time. Sometimes though - it won't come back on.The Ugly:I bought a 2TB internal disk drive and the CoolMax external disk drive container so I could save a few bucks. Within one week the new disk drive crashed taking with it all of the video tapes I had transferred over to the external disk drive (about 1,000 videos). Luckily for me - I own a copy of File Scavenger. I took the case apart, left one end off of it, and drilled a bunch of holes into the case so the heat can escape. File Scavenger is still scanning the disk (because it IS a 2TB disk drive) and I still have to recover all of the files. Once done I'm going to try a low-level reformat of the 2TB disk drive (which will probably take about a week to do) and see if it is even usable anymore. Price for all of this? Around $120.00 for the drive and case and about $1,000 worth of my time. If you are thinking of buying this then get your drill ready and put a bunch of holes into the case on top and bottom so the hot air can escape and thus suck in cool air from the bottom.I looked around on Amazon.com and someone is selling 2TB Seagate external disk drives for $85.00. I have just bought three of these to replace the three 2TB drives I bought and put into these cases. Two of these have arrived already and they work like a dream. They come with a built-in fan, are very quiet, and do not overheat. Wish I had gone that route first. To find them just put in "2TB external hard drive" and they will pop-up.If you are trying to convert your video library to digital I suggest the follow: Dazzler to capture the video. It works like a dream and you can use Microsoft's Movie Maker with it to capture the video to WMV. For editing the video: Sony Vegas Platinum DVD Studio. Easiest video editor around. Or use Movie Maker if all you want to do is to crop the film. Be forewarned though - video tapes take up a lot of space on your hard drive. Usually around 1GB per film. Which is why you will need a 2TB disk drive to store everything after a while. We had over 500 VHS video tapes, around 800 CDs, and probably 300-400 home video files. (This is not to mention the DVDs given to us by other family members of various events.) It has taken me about five years to get to this point and having the 2TB disk drive go belly-up because it overheated was not a pleasant surprise. But once I am through I think I will enjoy the new external 2TB disk drives I just bought.In this instance - I would say "Buyer Beware".