2.5 Sata to USB Hard Drive Caddy HDD Enclosure Case Laptop and PC parts

I grabbed one of these caddies to help out a friend who wanted to re-use the hard drive from her old, defunct laptop.The caddy arrived quickly, and overall is well made. Installing the SATA laptop drive took 30 seconds, and the whole assembly took two minutes, tops. The caddy was recognised by my Mac and I could access the laptop drive, reformat it and so forth without issue.The caddy has a slower, USB2 interface, and is supplied with a Y cable for connection to the host computer. At first glance, this might seem a bit of a pain, but in fact makes sense. The Y cable end provides connections for data and power. Older laptop drives can be quite power hungry, and although I could find single cable USB3 SATA caddies on Amazon UK, it wasn’t clear if those caddies would be able to power the drive effectively. The USB2 interface is obviously slower than USB3, but as most laptop drives are 5400rpm drives the interface difference wouldn’t give that much extra of a performance boost to my mind. Providing separate power and data connections for the USB interface ensures that one port isn’t potentially overloaded, guarantees adequate power and spreads the load across USB ports.There are a couple of points to note. Unlike purpose-made USB-bus powered hard drives, there is no real shock protection for the enclosed drive. The supplied plastic pouch doesn’t really add any protection when transporting the drive, so a dedicated, padded carrying pouch might be an idea if the caddy is going to be used on the move. The other thing to note is that the caddy will slide about a bit, and moving an enclosed drive whilst it’s in use may cause problems. I resolved this by slicking some self-adhesive feet that I had spare to the bottom of the caddy, and this stopped it moving around if the connecting cable was touched, for example. Such feet can be easily found cheaply on Amazon UK.Overall, in spite of the few minor grumbles, the caddy is a bargain at the price paid, and is a great way to re-purpose an older SATA laptop drive. Highly recommended.

I changed the hard drive on my laptop for a SSD to speed it up. That worked fine but reduced the storage on the laptop from 1000 gb to 240gb. I still had the 1000gb hard drive I had removed. I put it in this neat caddy. Now the hard drive can be used to store video, music and photos with out filling up the SSD which I can reserve for Windows 10 and apps.So I have the best of both worlds, and the drive, in its caddy takes up so little room alongside the laptop.

Very nice and simple piece of kit. Does exactly what you'd expect and almost nothing extra.It is perfectly possible to use this to permanently use laptop form factor hard drives with any computer. I am using it at work to retrieve data from a hard drive from a dead laptop. Working superbly - plug and play, no additional driver installations required. The time it takes to see the hard drive in Windows doesn't seem any longer than normal spin-up time.It has a red LED at the usb side which flashes with disk activity. That is the extent of its additional functionality - if you want fancy, look elsewhere.The packaging was superb. It came with two screws, a little cheap leather-looking case, and a tiny screwdriver - fabulous. For £5.99 I did not expect any extras whatsoever, so very pleasantly surprised.The casing is solid and feels robust, as well as being reasonably visually attractive. It has no feet, so I have had to add rubber pads to the bottom to stop it from sliding around.The electronics are minimal, and the sata connectors look as if they would snap off very easily if force was applied to them. That said, all appears to work absolutely fine so no complaints from me. The circuitry/soldering looks somewhat messy - but again, works fine. No complaints.The only problem I have encountered with this is that for HDDs, they will get warmer than usual due to no airflow. It hasn't actually got to temperatures approaching where the hard drive would be damaged, but still worth noting. If you were to use it 24/7 it may get too hot.

My Dell laptop recently quit working due to a known problem with the motherboard and overheating. It's well out of warranty so I now have a very expensive door stop. I back up my hard drive about 3-4 times per year, but this still meant that I was missing a few months of music, photos and data. I knew that the hard drive was not damaged, so I began googling how to get to my old data and move it to my new laptop. That's when I discovered this little gem. For just a few quid (and 2 day shipping, thanks Amazon!) I popped in my old laptop hard drive and now have a perfectly funtioning, 200 GB external (and portable) drive! Was able to recover all my old data and now have a (free) extra hard drive where I can store all my music files. I used the included USB cable to attach the device to my stand-alone multimedia computer and job done. Installation took me about 5 minutes, the necessary screwdriver is included in the package as well as the USB cable. In less than 10 minutes I had my old hard drive (turned new external drive) up and running. This is such a fantastic idea, can't recommend it enough. I've been running it for about 3 weeks now with no problems. It doesn't get hot. I know that some people have stated that it fails after a few months, but willing to give it a go for the low price, could always replace it again. One tip: be sure that you check your hard drive type (SATA will only fit SATA).

Pretty useful. Fit & finish of the plastic parts isn't the best, but certainly not the worst.The unit came with one of those 2-into-1 USB leads which has an extra plug on one end to supply more current to the HDD. It is important to not that the extra plug doesn't transmit any data - it is for power only - so make sure that the data plug (the one which isn't tacked on the side) goes into the computer's USB port. The power plug (looks like it's just sprouted out of the side of the other plug) can either take its current from another USB port on the computer, or be plugged into a USB mains power adaptor.