Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with enclosure

How do I build a balcony enclosure to reduce wind and noise yet preserve my awesome view of NYC?

jacquilinala — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 08:37:41 -0800

Help me make my noisy, windy city balcony more enjoyable. I recently moved into an awesome apartment in Brooklyn. It's on the 6th floor and has a balcony... which has an unobstructed, amazing view of the Manhattan skyline. However! My apartment faces the BQE and it's noisy. It's also freaking cold out now, and being on the 6th floor, it's very windy on the balcony.

I thought it would be a fun project to try to build a balcony enclosure of some sort. While I don't want to obstruct my view of the city, I would love to be able to go out there and not feel like I was going to blow away. Noise insulation of some sort would be great too.

I googled around and found this, and while that's the same idea, it's not what I'm looking for. I'm thinking more like going to a lumber yard, buying some kind of wood (?), and DIYing it. Some sort of noise insulation stuff. Maybe plexiglass on one side to preserve the view?

Of course, this would have to work in the summer too...

Ideas? Here are the dimensions... and a picture of the balcony.

129" wide (approx 126" within the railings)

49" deep (approx 46" within)

43" height of railing.

pic 1 and pic 2

Thanks!

Dual-Bay SATA Enclosures

sdis — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 15:05:09 -0800

Dual-bay SATA Enclosures! Which ones let me copy from one drive to the other on a Mac? I have my eye out on this inexpensive one, and in the end, I want a box into which I can stuff two harddrives, copy stuff between them, and copy stuff between my internal laptop harddrive and them. Bonus points if I can hook it up via USB to my Airport Extreme and get two network drives.

Will this EagleTech one do what I need? If not, what will?

(Having trouble finding detailed info on this enclosure, although from various reviews, it appears that it supports RAID 0 as well as "normal", though I'm not clear what "normal" would be in this circumstance)

Are there any hard drive enclosures for 3.5" form HDs that can be powered off a USB port alone?

chefscotticus — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 22:30:29 -0800

Are there any hard drive enclosures for 3.5" form HDs that can be powered off a USB port alone? (ie, without additional AC plug) I'm looking for a HD enclosure to use with a Western Digital 1.5 TB Caviar Green SATA Hard Drive (WD15EADS) that wouldn't require me to plug an AC adapter into the wall. WD claims this drive uses 40% less power -- not sure if that matters.

It will be primarily connected to a MacBook (5.1) that has 2 USB 2.0 ports, but no FireWire.

Recommend a Portable Hard Drive Enclosure?

InvestorMD — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 22:59:05 -0800

I've recieved two hard drives for free from my father. I'm thinking I could sell one or both. However, I'm also thinking I could turn it into a portable external hard drive for storing my photos. I need recommendation on enclosures. The first hard drive is a Maxtor Model:6b200s0 200GB SATA drive. The other is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB SATA (Model:st3400832as).

Any and all ideas are welcome. As I said, the best idea I could come up with is to turn one into an external portable HD to connect via USB to the various laptops I have. This would allow me a central location for my photography collection.

I'm looking for a reliable enclosure. Anyone currently using one that has lasted more than 2 years?

Thanks in advance!

My hard drive is too big for your enclosure.

meantime — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:31:36 -0800

My hard drive is too big for your enclosure! My Thinkpad died. Fortunately, I think the hard drive is ok. I purchased a 2.5" external enclosure to try to recover the data from the 2.5" drive. It doesn't fit. What do I need? Details inside. The drive is a Hitachi Travelstar 40gb 5400rpm. I bought a Vantec NexStar SX external 2.5" Enclosure.

Not only does the drive not fit in the enclosure, but the connections are not the compatible. I'm not sure if this helps, but here are the best pictures I could find online.Here is a picture of the inside of the enclosure. Here is a pic of the drive.

Is there a different enclosure that I should be using? Or can I fix the current situation somehow?

What techniques, tools or resources do you use for modifying enclosures in electronic projects?

st0rey — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 21:35:47 -0800

What techniques, tools or resources do you use for modifying enclosures in electronic projects? I'm a beginner to electronics; I recently completed a project that necessitated an enclosure. What I found was a lack of resources
available on how to prepare an enclosure: how I'd secure my PCBs and wires inside, and how I'd get a professional look with external wires and buttons. Any advice?

SCSI enclosure on the cheap?

lattiboy — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 10:30:33 -0800

Looking for a DYI SCSI enclosure on the cheap. Any ideas? So my boss bestowed on me 5 beautiful 15K SCSI drives and a card. I can put the card in my current PC and run an external cable to the drives in another tower. Basically, I'm looking for a case with 5 3.5" slots and room for a standard power supply (I'm guessing my 550W Antec can't handle my OCd C2D, 7900GT, and a few other devices on TOP of the 5 new SCSI drives).

A follow up question: He gave me these because I'm running into a bottleneck with handling a lot of 20MB RAW files from my A700 on my current rig. Is this complete overkill? I've heard the 7200.11 Seagates are near as fast as Raptors now.

ONE more follow up question: If I'm not worried about data redundancy (I have an external that backs up important files every night), what is the best way to implement these drives in Windows XP?

I just wanna buy the drives naked and have one adapter to rule them all

GleepGlop — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 10:19:54 -0800

What is the best solution for having a whole bunch of hard drives and being able to easily swap them around? I find myself with more and more hard drives, and right now I have a 2.5" and a 3.5" enclosure that require a lot of screwdriver action to swap the hard drives out.
My ideal solution: bus powered, supports any size of 2.5 or 3.5", and easy to swap the drives.
I've seen things where you stick the HDD in like a nintendo cartridge but I understand that more capacious hard drives may take up more physical space and maybe not all drives would fit inside.
I've also seen cheap USB 2.0 to SATA cable adapters on newegg where the drive just connects and sits there with no enclosure around it but they are low priced and perhaps low on reliability, and I don't know if I should be worried about having an exposed hard drive. Maybe I would need some kind of snap case to go with that option.

Data dilemma

crazycanuck — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 15:23:59 -0800

JudgeMe: is it ethical to buy a hard drive enclosure for the express purpose of data recovery and then return the enclosure immediately after the data has been recovered? If not, please suggest an alternate method to get a hard drive enclosure for one day's use. Assume that canvassing one's friends is too inconvenient.

Cloning a laptop hard drive

nomad73 — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:40:39 -0800

Replacing my laptop's hard drive. I think I've almost got it but have some questions about the cloning process. I'm replacing the 60GB EIDE main hard drive (C: drive) of my 4 year old laptop with Win XP Home. I've got a new 160GB EIDE drive, a 2.5" hard drive enclosure, and was planning on using XXCLONE to get the job done. All has gone well so far - I've connected the new drive to the laptop via the USB enclosure, and formatted it. Here are my questions:

1) When I formatted the new drive (using the Windows disk management tool) it asked me to pick a drive letter. I picked a random letter down the alphabet - H: - so as not to get confused with the other two external USB drives I've got running. If the idea is to make a clone of my C: drive and then take it out of my laptop and install my new drive, will the drive letter matter? Will the OS simply see the new drive as the C: drive even though I named it H: when I formatted it? If not, how do I go about naming the new drive C: while I've still got to clone the actual C: drive?

2) XXCLONE has the option, when cloning, to make the new drive bootable - which is what I would like to do, I assume. It copies the master boot record and all that. Does that mean that no matter the drive letter I assign to the new drive, when i pop it into my laptop, it will just boot from the new drive and everything will be fine?

3) Other cloning programs seem to either create a bootable CD that you then run while the C: drive is cloned. XXCLONE does not do this - it operates in XP. Will that present any problems in terms of not copying EVERY exact OS file? I'd rather not spend the $ on Norton Ghost or the full version of Acronis True Image, hence why I'm using XXCLONE - free.

Thank you for any advice you may have. Much appreciated.

Save my data before the disk asplode

djgh — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:21:04 -0800

My external hard-drive's on the fritz. What can I do to make sure I get all my data off it before it goes? I've got a 250GB hard drive which I put in an enclosure (cheap CompUSA one). It's got a red light and a green light. Recently, the red light will come on after a little bit and stay on (so not the blinking "transferring data" signal).

After the light comes on, the USB connection freaks out - if it's connected, it freezes, if it's not connected and I plug it in, it refuses to connect. (Disk Utility will show the drive, but not the partition. The partition refuses to mount, and the icon doesn't show up on the desktop).

What steps should I take to make sure I don't lose everything (it's my main music'n'movies drive...)?

I'm assuming that at some point it will be beneficial to pop the drive out and test in another enclosure, but assuming that doesn't work (worst case scenario and all), what should I do? i.e., the disk itself is suffering issues (plus, it's probably very good to have a backup anyway...).

I'm on OSX Tiger, if it helps, and have access to another 40GB or so (another external drive). The drive is currently sat disconnected on my shelf, not even powered.

Cool things to do with an empty Power Mac G5 enclosure?

porn in the woods — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:49:38 -0800

I've had a bare Power Mac G5 case in my office since last summer (original water-cooled quad processor melted down, needing a pile of parts and netting me an extra case in the process). What should I do with this spare cheesegrater case? I don't need a PC (Boot Camp/Parallels is doing me fine), otherwise I'd try swapping in a PC mobo/PS. A MacQuarium is probably not going to work too well. What would you do if you had a spare aluminum beast like this? Giant FireWire case with stacks of drives? Humorous solutions are welcome, something that would amuse fellow geeks if it were in my office.

IDE RAID Enclosure

chunking express — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:02:16 -0800

Does anyone know good IDE Raid enclosures? I currently own two 250 gig IDE hard drives and want to set them up in a single RAID enclosure. I have been looking around for a while but can only find SATA raid enclosures. I'm asking for my brother. He currently owns the Netgear SC101 and says it didn't really work that great.

My MadDog enclosure should be called HotDog

penciltopper — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 14:48:40 -0800

My new HD enclosure gets really hot. Should I worry? I just got one of these and although it's just what I wanted, it's still really HOT after copying 40gb onto it two hours ago.

Not having an IR thermometer handy I'd say it's holding-hot-coffee-in-a-paper-cup hot.
Uncomfortable in the hand; wouldn't want it in my lap.

It says it's anodized metal, but it feels like plastic.
There doesn't seem to be any venting; but does a HD in a box need to be vented?
I've got it oriented vertically on its stand for maximum heat dissipation, but I can't see that making much difference.

I'm worried that I'm going to bake my data right off the thing. It has to be plugged in and turned on 24/7.

Should I just take the drive out and drill some air holes in the enclosure? Will that let the magic out?

Or is it b0rken and I should send it back as the Ford Pinto of HD enclosures?

How can I troubleshoot an external drive that won't mount?

sparrows — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:36:44 -0800

External firewire drive was working fine with Mac laptop, now won't mount. I hear it make its usual startup noises and then I feel it spinning happily, but the OS can't see it. I've tried lots of troubleshooting steps (list inside); can you think of others I should try? I'm running Mac OS 10.4.10 on a MacBook Pro. This is a 2.5" drive inside a MacAlly firewire enclosure. This setup has worked perfectly for a year.

- Drive and enclosure were both bought new a year ago and have led an easy life (pretty low usage, no physical impact/trauma).
- No magnets near the drive.
- No other hardware issues with the laptop (ever).
- No power events, I assume -- there hasn't been a storm, my building's power is modern, the laptop is plugged into a surge protector (enclosure draws its power from the firewire port).
- No changes to the OS or to any software in between when it mounted and didn't.
- Drive is spinning silently, no clicks or other noises. Vibration of spinning feels the same to me as always.
- Indicator LED on enclosure is lit up as usual when drive is powered on.

I've tried, with no success:
- restarting Mac (several times).
- connecting drive with its on/off switch already turned to on (usually I'd connect it with the switch off, then turn switch to on).
- relaunching Finder while drive is connected & spinning.
- opening Disk Utility, in case OS is seeing drive and just not displaying it in the Finder (no luck -- only drive displayed in Disk Utility is my internal HD).
- trying to mount it connected by USB rather than Firewire (enclosure has both full-size fw and mini usb connections). This might not be a useful test since I've never tried mounting it by USB in the past, so I don't know if it can draw enough power from the USB port (and I can't find the little AC cable it came with for situations when it can't draw enough).

I don't have another 2.5" enclosure on hand, I don't have any other device that connects via Firewire, and it will be a week until I have access to another person's Mac to test it that way.

Please let me know any more troubleshooting I can do with just my own laptop, the drive & enclosure, and Firewire & USB cables. Thank you!

enclosure for 2.5in and 3.5in drives?

advil — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:42:54 -0800

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.

Are there any particularly awesome external firewire hard drive enclosures that I should be aware about?

chunking express — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:43:34 -0800

Are there any particularly awesome external firewire hard drive enclosures that I should be aware about? I want to put a Western Digital 500 GB SATA drive in one. I'm interested in enclosures people have actually used. (I can find reviews online myself.)

Enclosure kit question

MostHolyPorcine — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 02:14:25 -0800

Laptop HDD Enclosure kit question. My Toshiba Satellite S2051 recently died. I bought a new computer, and a hard drive enclosure kit, to move my old files to the new machine. However, when I tried to put the drive into the kit, I found out that the HDD is not 40-pin, and is instead a flat, slim connector, making it impossible to connect with the enclosure kit. Is there an adapter out there that will make this hdd connect to a 40-pin hole? Bonus points if you can tell me where to get it in Japan (I live in Nagano, so an amazon link would be dandy....)

Where could i find a sort of "Super External Enclosure"?

thirdoptical — Thu, 24 May 2007 14:47:11 -0800

Is there such thing as an all-in-one external enclosure that would house Hard Drives AND Optical Drives, and have USB and Firewire Hubs? I'm looking for some sort of "external tower" which would essentially be a fancy external hard drive enclosure. (instead of a giant messy stack of 4 different external enclosures, and 2 hubs with wires strung everywhere)

Something maybe aesthetically akin to the Fantom g-force Megadisk enclosure? ( http://www.micronet.com/General/prodList.asp?CatID=119&Cat=Product )

What i'm looking for is an external case that can hold 2 or more hard drives, (IDE, SATA whatever, which could RAID or not, i don't really care) but also (ideally two, but one would be okay) an external optical drive (5.25"), (DVD or CD or Bluray, whatever, again, either IDE or SATA) and also a firewire and USB hub.

The thing would plug in to the computer's firewire, and USB, and a power adapter to the wall.

Does anything like this exist? i just want a single enclosure for multiple drives (Hard drive and optical drives) with some USB and Firewire ports.

Newertech makes the "ministack v2" ( http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ministack/ ) which is essentially half of what i want (1 HD, USB and Firewire hubs, but no optical drives.) I'm just looking for the ministack's big brother.

does anything like this exist? anywhere? I want to use it with a Mac, if that's not obvious by my references, but i doubt it makes much of a difference. i would much prefer to use Firewire for the connection to the drives.

any help would be very appreciated!

Is it possible to use a USB hard disc enclosure with a CD-ROM?

Bugbread — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 10:07:59 -0800

Is it possible to use a USB hard disc enclosure with a CD-R/RW? I'm trying to install Ubuntu on a laptop without a CD drive. I've looked into using a USB flash drive, but apparently the installation is fraught with peril. However, everyone agrees that installing from an installation CD is easy as pie.

However, I don't have a USB CD drive either.

What I do have is a USB hard drive that's collecting dust, and an internal CD-R/RW that is also collecting dust.

I know that the CD-R/RW will not actually fit in the enclosure, and that the whole thing would be jury-rigged as all hell, but I only need it to work until Ubuntu is installed.

So, could I hook the IDE port of the CD-R/RW to the IDE interface at the back of the enclosure, the power port to the power port on the enclosure, plug the power cable of the enclosure into the wall, and plug the USB port into the laptop, thereby making the HDD enclosure act like a CD-R/RW enclosure?

PATA or SATA for an enclosed drive?

pompomtom — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 19:19:29 -0800

If I'm buying a hard disk which will be put into an external enclosure (most likely a 320Gb Seagate), connected via USB2 (not eSATA), is there ANY practical difference (apart from the $5-10 price difference) between picking PATA or SATA?

A tough drive to mount . . .

drewcopeland — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 12:12:27 -0800

Every time I boot up my Intel Imac, I have to unplug and then replug my external hard drive in order for it to mount. It's a 160GB Seagate SATA internal that I put in an iRocks 3.5 enclosure (USB). When I open up Disk Utility, the drive is not displayed in the left column (until I unplug, then plug). It's just storage for my EyeTV files, but still annoying to have to do that every time. Ideas?

Must connect the male bit to the female bit! IDEs and SATAs!

bkudria — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 18:18:13 -0800

Is there such a thing as an IDE to SATA converter? I have an SATA hard drive and a IDE-to-USB enclosure. I'd like to keep the enclosure and not buy another because I am a cheap (and I really like it). Can I buy a cheap, small (so it fits inside the enclosure!) IDE-SATA converter/adapter? Do such things exist? Is it even technically possible?

Thanks!

Are All Drive Enclosures Basically The Same?

optimuscrime — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 13:31:57 -0800

Hello, Hive Mind. I'm about to buy a Mac Mini for my space-cramped office. However, I want to be able to use my two old IDE drives. So, what kind of enclosure should I buy? Are they all essentially the same? Should I go for USB or Firewire?

Internal HD Enclosure?

gd779 — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 06:44:00 -0800

Internal HD enclosure/bay suggestions? I've got a Dell 5150 with a Serial ATA primary drive. I'm trying to install a second hard drive which requires an older IDE connection. Because of the 5150's case design, the best place to put this IDE drive is in the second "slot" just below the CD drive. However, just placing the HD in that spot isn't a great option, because a) the drive is smaller than the slot, so I can't secure the drive against the case, and therefore it might slide around if the case is bumped and b) I'm concerned that the drive might overheat if it is placed directly on top of the solid-metal shelf which protects the floppy drive beneath it. Therefore, I'm looking to buy online a bay or enclosure which will solve these two problems. First, is my concern about heat valid? I don't really know. Second, where can I buy an "internal" enclosure or bay which will protect this drive and secure it to the case? The drive is a 200GB Seagate Barracuda 7200, and the space it's currently occupying is designed to hold a second CD drive, so that's how wide it is. Is there a way of securing this drive in the existing space?

Thanks in advance for your help. These may be basic questions, but I've been working on this problem for several weeks now, without much success.