Vantec NexStar TX 3.5" USB 3.0 Hard Drive Enclosure (NST-328S3-BK),Black

I was originally buying Generic 3.5" SATA External USB Enclosures from an eBay source for about $14ea with shipping. I would buy a few here and a few there and sometimes would get a bad one here and there due to bad electronics. I always got replacements from the eBay vendor and they paid return shipping so I had no problem being I was getting them so cheap, worked well and looked pretty good. Lately, my cheap Chinese supplier made some revisions to the enclosures I had been buying for some time, got 2 that had bad electronics. Got another 2 where the sata cable was suddenly revised and so short you couldn't push the drive cover into the enclosure all the way to screw it on and would crack a drive's SATA connector. Then they changed the positioning of a connector on the enclosure's PCB where it would hit the back of the drive's SATA power connector and you couldn't screw the cap on. I returned 4 and got 4 back that had a different issue. I was only paying $14ea with shipping from this eBay source but I started to get sick and tired of the poor hit and miss quality control. I started buying some stuff on Amazon lately, due to generally pretty good prices and selection, its ease and ability to actually see product reviews before buying which is usually helpful. I was searching for enclosures hoping to find another cheap source. While I wasn't able to find another decent enclosure anywhere near the price I was paying, I was able to find this Vantec NexStar CX NST-300S2-BK 3.5-Inch SATA to USB enclosure, received the 3 I ordered today and I am so far very pleased. The drive is well made, drive just slides into a PCB mounted SATA connector, screw in the drive into the bottom of the bracket, connect the LED connector, slide the bracket into the shell, 2 screws no issues, good design and they look high quality and sleek as well. So far I'm very impressed with this enclosure and if I can continue to buy them for $24 and if they continue to work as well as I hope I will probably buy more unless I find another good enclosure that's considerably cheaper. I also like the fact that even the box was well thought out and has foam around the enclosure. Although additional padding and an additional box is necessary when shipping one of these enclosures with a hard drive in it, the additional padding is excellent extra protection. So far this is one of the cheapest, highest quality, nicest looking enclosures I have been able to find. I saw some complaints about drives getting too hot and I agree it's a serious issue, however 95 percent of ALL enclosures are sold with absolutely no fan cooling or proper ventilation (even when designed and made by hard drive manufacturers), it's just the way it is and another way for companies to cut costs. I can also say that at least the enclosure isn't super thick and heavy like LaCie's poorly designed metal enclosures they usually put their 3.5" drives in that are responsible for a lot of heat related failures. In fact the cheap Chinese enclosures I was buying before also had a thicker metal housing which caused the drives to run hotter than the Vantec, which has a thin aluminum which helps dissipate heat at least somewhat. Although the Vantec enclosure may feel hotter to some, it may be possible that more heat is just being dissipated to the outside of the enclosure which is the reason the enclosure feels so hot. Unfortunately lack of cooling is really an industry wide issue that most companies either aren't aware of or aren't willing to spend a few cents per drive to improve cooling to help reduce drive failure. I have found a few fan cooled enclosures but have found they typically run about twice as much and don't tend to be really good besides the fact that they are fan cooled.

Used to have my hard drives in “simplecom” external enclosures however these proved unreliable. Vantec whilst more expensive provided reliability which is a must in my use case. Enclosure also works with 22TB drive in case anyone is like me and needs to use it for such big storage.

It's simply amazing. Super fast, easy to operate, convenient, trouble free and cool. I like it.

I've got three Vantec external enclosures. All of them do the job very reliably. None have ever failed. The oldest is a NexStar 2 (it's an ATA unit, which I don't think they make any more.) The lights stopped working, but the unit itself keeps on truckin'. My NextStar3 and CX are diehard. Along with the old NexStar2, I use them as redundant backups for my main drive. That is, each drive backs up my OS and data at different times of day. (I can't afford to lose my work.) Never had a problem with them. Manufacturing quality is top-notch. Vantec uses solid materials. The 3 gets warmer to the touch than the CX, but neither one gets really hot, so don't worry about the claims that heat is any problem at all. All the units are quiet as could be. Yah, you can hear them hum quietly, but drives hum. There is no vibration that you'd ever notice. I'm about to buy another CX, which I will use to clone my main drive once a week. Catastrophic crashes have been rare, but I really don't like reinstalling Windows, drivers and apps from scratch. This is long-term insurance against such problems. In case anyone finds this useful... if/when my main drive crashes or Win7 goes crackers, all I'll have to do is pull my regularly-cloned drive out of the Vantec case, drop it into my pc, and I'll be back in business instantly. Since I keep all my data in separate logical drives amd backed up in my other Vantec cases, all my data will be instantly available, too. For added paranoid protection, I also use Carbonite for offsite data backup protection. I like using the Vantecs because, unlike the popular self-contained external drives, you can swap drives when you need to, and you can buy the kinds of drives you prefer. Drives are so cheap now that I keep a library of them on the shelf, and off-site. Vantec makes it easy to install/remove a drive from the enclosure. Even a novice should be able to install their drives without any trouble. The manuals are clear. For fast-swap work, I also own a Vantec Universal Storage Adapter, which lets me plug in bare drives of any kind, as well as memory cards. It's a great tool for on-the-fly work with drives. Kudos to Vantec. They're an important part of my storage. For what it's worth, I have no relationship to the company, financial or otherwise, except as a customer. And I rarely rave about a manufacturer about anything.

Simple to set up, although came with a US plug, so had to use an adaptor. Only 4 stars as the US plug wasn't mentioned.