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"Vantec NST-350U2 3.5" Hard Drive Enclosure"
Having just purchased a new hard drive enclosure for the use of my ITX system, I thought I would share some opinions on it. As of the late, I have been finding the 40 GB hard drive I originally used quite limiting and am requiring more storage space. As for why I didn't go for a new internal drive would be I am using a laptop drive and they are fairly expensive and tend to have low capacity.
So opting for a cheaper alternative (plus I can still use the original 40 GB) and portability, I went with a Vantec 3.5" NexStar Drive enclosure and a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160 GB PATA 8 MB cache Drive.
After opening the box and seeing all the goodies it came with:
It looked simple to install, as Vantec claimed no drivers required for ME/2K/XP and as I am running 2K SP4 on my ITX system, I was in the clear. However, this was not the case. You must first partition the drive and then format it, as I ended up learning the hard way. So if you were planning on going the HDD enclosure route, just keep that in the back of your mind when buying. Once I got that all sorted out, it was clear sailing from that point on.
Simply open up on the enclosure and you will find this:
Connect the Molex connector and the IDE cable to the HDD (I set the drive to master):
Flip over the enclosure and screw in the 4 supplied screws to secure the HDD to the enclosure:
Put the Aluminum covers back on and finally, screw in the once again included cover screws using the included screwdriver. The included screw driver is nothing more than a jewelers screw driver for those of you who don't have one lying around. The 2 screws per cover are quite small, but can still be made out on the back side of the enclosure here:
And now you're done - you should have one fully working external HDD.
For those of you who like numbers, here are a few quick SiSandra tests I ran to give you a basic idea of how the drive performs in an enclosure.
TEST SYSTEM
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