enclosure for 2.5in and 3.5in drives?

November 21, 2007 2:42 PM

Is there such a thing as a hard drive enclosure that supports both SATA 2.5in and 3.5in drives?

I need to try to do some one-off data recovery on a 2.5in SATA drive. However, it seems like a 3.5in enclosure is more generally useful, and I have a 3.5in drive I accidentally bought that is much larger than my current hard drives (future-shock inducing even), and I have to decide whether to return it or get an enclosure for it. Preferably this would be something at least as cheap as just buying two enclosures (I've seen some complicated and expensive multi-drive enclosures but that's not really what I'm looking for).

So ideally I'd like a single device that I can use for my one-off data recovery and then use as an actual enclosure for 3.5in drives. My feeble searches are not turning up anything.

posted by advil to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: Not exactly what you want, but there are adapter brackets made which will allow fitting a 2.5" HD into a 3.5" slot. Here's one (ignore the irrelevant-to-you bundled IDE cable adapter; also, I have no idea whether the seller is reputable).
posted by box at 2:52 PM on November 21, 2007

Best answer: At work I use one of these drivedocks from Wiebetech. It isn't enclosed but will allow you to connect both sizes of SATA drives to it. Works with Firewire 800 and USB 2. If you only have Firewire 400 you'll need a firewire 800 to 400 cable. I know it isn't exactly what you're looking for but may be close enough.
posted by J-Garr at 3:39 PM on November 21, 2007

Best answer: We just use the adapters with no enclosure.
posted by theora55 at 5:06 PM on November 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

Best answer: This may be useful, but it's not really an "enclosure".
posted by Nightwind at 3:02 AM on November 22, 2007

Response by poster: Okay, a little followup. I ended up getting the Rosewill device, but the other two connectors for bare devices would have served the same purpose. I also ended up getting a separate 3.5" enclosure because I wanted to keep that drive completely enclosed and use it as a permanent external disk. I decided it would be useful to me to have both so I could occasionally make complete clones of my internal drive on a matched 2.5" drive without taking apart the enclosure, but if I hadn't decided this the bare disk adaptors on their own would have been perfect.

For what I was originally asking I think that box's answer may have actually been the best, though its not what I went with and this wasn't entirely apparent until I got what I got. Here's the full story, for posterity, since I was completely unable to find this out in advance from google. What I hadn't fully appreciated is when asking this question is that (a) the connector for SATA is the same regardless of physical size; I was still stuck in an IDE mindset or something, and (b) enclosures that support multiple disk types don't have a fixed/rigid connector. The enclosure I got (which has poor build quality so I won't recommend it in particular) has flexible cables that you attach. So as long as I had a way to mount a 2.5in drive it would have worked fine in there, and I think brackets like those would have done the trick.

Thanks everyone!
posted by advil at 1:33 PM on December 5, 2007