Review of BYTECC External Drive Enclosure

[Soopafresh]

The question of external drive enclosure recommendations crops up from time to time. Just installed the BYTECC ME-835U2F for a friend.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817145383

It has some nice features not often seen on other external units, the coolest being the lack of External Power Adapter- AKA "Wall Wart" All you need is a standard PC power cable, of which we all have a surplus. Awesome.

http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/productimage/17-145-383-03.JPG

The other feature I found to be unique was an under-the-drive cooling fan, which looks like a smaller version of this this device:

http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/productimage/35-185-002-03.JPG

Installed a 400GB (378GB is more like it) Seagate IDE drive. Formatted NTFS under XP. The controller immediately showed up in Windows. Although the enclosure comes with a driver disk, it isn't necessary for most existing XP installations. Tested out the 1394/FireWire interface by copying files from the internal to external hard drives.

Some caveats: What's the term - "Sits Vertically"? - The stand for it is sturdy, but I'd consider Velcroing it down if it was sitting on top of a tower style computer. It would be safer keeping it on the desktop, then running the data cable between the enclosure and the PC (obviously). It comes with a FireWire and USB cable.

So far, so good. I'll update if any problems emerge.

[Poppa_Meth]

Hopefully they've improved. I had two on the them, the 5.25 Silver ones. One constantly corrupted a HDD I had in it and the other caused bad burns on nearly every disc I ran through the burner it housed. Multiple tries at different firware for the enclosure didn't help. I got it because it was cheap but I ended up with a venus enclosure in the end.