Ultra Mini Portable Disk Hard Drive Enclosure

The Ultra Mini Portable Disk, Hard Drive Enclosure, is one of those little boxes you put a standard hard drive inside and then use it to externally backup your data. You can use it exactly like an internal drive. This one has firewire (also known as IEEE 1394) and USB 2.0 connections, so you get blistering speed during transfer.

I recently had a backup frenzy and after using this I am not going back to backing up to a seperate computer on the network. I don't yet have gigabit ethernet, and the difference between doing a 50GB backup over the network and straight onto this seemed impressive!

All I did before placing it in the box was format the drive and that was it. I was lucky enough to have gotten a Western Digital 250GB Internal Hard Drive. So that gives me two 100GB drives and one 50GB, which can be attached to anything fairly recent. It is simple and the lights show when it is accessed, just like the hard drive light on any other tower or laptop.

The whole thing consists of the the box you see below, and a power supply, as well as a USB, and a firewire cable. So you just plug in the firewire or USB into your computer, and then it sees another drive. Super-duper-simple. The feet on the enclosure hide the screws to open the case, and there is a fan at the back. Take out the screws, crack open the case, and inside you find a little piece of circuit board, with a short IDE cable, as well as a power plug. It's a snug fit, but once it's in, you would have little reason to be taking it out every five mins.

Remember folks, this does NOT include the hard drive.



While writing this little piece I could not find the manufacturers anywhere? Lesson, don't call yourself something nobody can search for...