StarTech.com 3.5" External SATA Hard Drive Enclosure - Trayless - eSATA / USB 3.0 (USB 3.1 Gen 1) Hard Drive Enclosure w/ UASP , TAA (S351BMU33ET)

Very good design and it works very well as with other products of this company. The only problem that it is not designed to support HDDs over 4Tb, which is a bit "outdated" by today's standards. Otherwise, it is perfectly OK.

High quality product.

Headline really says it all, but I love this enclosure. I have gotten a number of them over the years, and this is by far the best. Not only does it look cool (nice light display up front), it keeps drives cool without requiring a fan. Very sturdy and works with large capacity drives without a hitch -- I'm using it with an 8TB drive currently. Oh, and switch is at the top (or bottom if you prefer) unlike some that put them in the middle for some dumb reason. All-around perfect enclosure!

i bought this to add an extra drive to my synology station via synology esata port. works great for what i bought it for. i have 3 of the exact same drives. the 3rd one is the esata external drive. the drive cooks in there... always running hot. i even bought a fan to put ontop of the case. made ~4C difference. i was before running hot into the 63Cs++ and more ... the thing is just a solid cooker. no air flow. otherwise i like it. However they really should have thought of this. a little disappointed

I had researched enclosures for my data backup drive. I had looked several varieties read reviews and such. While this enclosure did not have a lot of reviews, I had owned several other Startech products from seven foot network racks, to wall mounted racks, cloners and other items. So I decided this would be a great new item to try out. Packaged well, had both an esata cable and 3.0 usb cable in the box. I coupled the enclosure with a WD Blue 4 tb drive and the drive and enclosure worked well together. I have completed my much needed always on local backup- instead of the once a week backup on a portable drive. I feel this will get the job done until I can put in a NAS and I am using Blazebackup as my offsite backup solution. So in short, this enclosure helps bridge the data backup for local storage and will work well for most people. I did not test this with a 2.5 SSD, as that was not an option until the price of SSDs over 4tbs comes down.

This is a good external drive bay. I already have one and wanted another. But buy it somewhere elseif you can. I bought from Amazon because I couldn't find the version that includes eSATA anywhere else, and it provides some benefit like being able to collect smart statistics. Typical of Amazon it's been picked over and returned or something and the required power supply was missing.

The chassis, external power adapter, eSATA cable, and USB 3.0 cable all have good fit and finish, and feel solid. Drives slide in and out with minimal fuss. The product works flawlessly with Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD. But there is a major design flaw -- no cooling fan. I planned to use the enclosure for backups, cloning, etc., and knew that drives could be at 100% utilization for hours on end. During initial testing, I saw high drive drive temperatures in a matter of minutes. So, I decided to open the enclosure and see if I could add a fan. What I found is that StarTech had already done most of the engineering (!). The injected-molded plastic rear panel includes fan mounting hole and grill features, but they are not punched through. The printed circuit board is notched to accommodate a fan and has through-holes for installing a 2-terminal 0.1" pin header near where the fan should be. Mechanically, everything is there. But electrically, one PCB through-hole is connected to DC common, the other PCB through-hole seemed to be floating, and DC positive is soft-switched on the PCB (not directly by the on/off switch). I decided to complete the rear panel features, install a fan, install a pin header, and hot-wire the floating pin to the incoming power connector DC positive. Beyond voiding the warranty, I knew that hot-wiring the fan pin could back-feed electronics and that I risked bricking the unit. I got lucky -- the electrical hack worked. The fan spins whenever the external power adapter is connected, regardless of the position of the on/off switch. The important thing is that drive temperatures now stay reasonable during continuous use.Even though I succeeded with the case mod/ electronics project, I would prefer that StarTech finish their engineering/ manufacturing and sell an enclosure with a working cooling fan.

This external drive enclosure is well designed. The front access door allows easy removal of a 3.5" SATA drive. The blue thin LEDs on the front face are very helpful to show when the drive is powered up and whenever data is being accessed. However, the one big flaw is that 2.5" drives will not work in this enclosure. I had to buy a 2.5"-to-3.5" converter tray in order to use my 2.5" SSD. It would be nice if they included this type of tray for free so that you can use either your 2.5" or 3.5" SATA drives with this enclosure.