[SOLVED] Need Advice on External Hard Drive Enclosures

MasterYoda327

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May 26, 2019
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I plan to build my own external hard drive for my new gaming PC. I will use the external hard drive to store backups of documents, photos, music, videos, and games. I have settled on a 4TB 5400 RPM Seagate Barracuda for the HDD, but I am uncertain on whether I should purchase an enclosure with or without a built-in cooling fan. Now I am not not located in a hot or surface-of-the-sun location. I may access Word and Excel documents from and maybe play a little music or videos off of the external drive. Right now, I am leaning toward the Inateck 3.5 Hard Drive Enclosure, Aluminum USB 3.0 Sata HDD Enclosure, FE3001 since that case was recommend from multiple review and ranking sources, but would I be better off with a case with a cooling fan such as the FIDECO External Hard Drive Enclosure with Fan for 3.5/2.5 Inch SATA Hard Drive, 3.5/2.5 Inch HDD Enclosure or Rosewill RX-358 U3C BLK Aluminum / Plastic 3.5" Black USB3.0 & eSATA External Enclosure? I am also open to suggestion on other reliable external hard drive enclosures.

Thanks.
 
Solution
Why not just buy a 4TB external drive? I've used a 2.5" Rosewill enclosure, no complaints.

Games I would put on a 2.5" SSD rather than a hard drive. Just bought my father a 1TB Samsung to refresh his laptop, only $110, and picked up a 500GB ($53) for my OS disk on an HTPC. 2TB MLC SSD aren't that bad right now. Guess I will keep the old Kingston Savage 256GB disk as a snapshot in time, maybe wipe it later and put it in someone's old laptop.

Not too far off from replacing my spinning drives with QLC NAND SSDs, another year or two and they will be worth it, maybe tack on an Optane cache disk if I want performance. $420 for 4TB from Samsung, really not bad, $105 per TB.

Anything small like important documents I tend to backup on to a...

Eximo

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Ambassador
Why not just buy a 4TB external drive? I've used a 2.5" Rosewill enclosure, no complaints.

Games I would put on a 2.5" SSD rather than a hard drive. Just bought my father a 1TB Samsung to refresh his laptop, only $110, and picked up a 500GB ($53) for my OS disk on an HTPC. 2TB MLC SSD aren't that bad right now. Guess I will keep the old Kingston Savage 256GB disk as a snapshot in time, maybe wipe it later and put it in someone's old laptop.

Not too far off from replacing my spinning drives with QLC NAND SSDs, another year or two and they will be worth it, maybe tack on an Optane cache disk if I want performance. $420 for 4TB from Samsung, really not bad, $105 per TB.

Anything small like important documents I tend to backup on to a few (multiple copies) flash drives for convenience. Bulk files I keep on loose hard disks and use a hard disk dock. Have some old 1.5 TB floating around, and some 3TB WD Green drives. Pretty much stopped buying 7200rpm drives in 2011 or so.
 
Solution