Looking for External HD enclosure advice
 

Specifics would be: I have a 500 GB SATA drive that is in perfect shape after the f$%#$ing Western Digital MyBook enclosure died. I did the easier thing - tossed the junker enclosure (who would seriously want another one?) and kept the drive - and would like to use it once more.
I built both of my main systems in 2001, and these motherboards have never heard of SATA or PCEI.
What made things more difficult was that my 80 GB IDE that was not that old (4-5? years maybe) dying just days the mybook. Needless to say losing 580 GB or so of available space was not pleasant. Fortunately I was bit leery of the external drive and had only used 40 GB on it; using more would be no problem at all if I had more faith in it.
What I am looking for now is a solid enclosure that will power down when inactive (not after two minutes either like the idiotic MyBook did) and not overheat or otherwise prematurely shorten the enclosed HD lifespan.
I was looking at newegg but would appreciate some "real life" advice or hearing about experiences good or otherwise here.

I have an Antec SATA harddisk enclosure, which works fine. It has active cooling (not too loud either), so it has no heat problems. As for the powering down: I haven't ever seen it power down, but that's probably because of my "keep everything on" power management settings. It has one flaw: Antec is more expensive than other (lesser) brands.

You can find more info here

I've generally found that most any external enclosure (where you supply your own hd) will work ok as long as it provides the correct interfaces you need for the hd and to connect to your pc. I personally prefer cases that have a build in fan instead of the ones that only do passive cooling (by using the case as a heatsink), but that is more of a personal preference (noise is a factor if you want the fan).

I have found places like directron to have a better selection then newegg but a lot of the manufacturers of hd cases tend to me more generic/unknown (name wise). I personally haven't had any bad experiences with external enclosures that weren't my fault.

I do have 1 rosewill (newegg) branded hd case that they had on sale for black friday that seems ok, but then I don't have my external hds running most of the time so I'm not a good judge of long term reliability of these cases.

I have noticed a lot of reviews/comments about how external hds (the ones you buy in store that come with the hd) seem to have a high failure rate, but the DIY (separate case /hd) method seems like it gives better reliabbility because you could swap out the bad part.

Hope that is the kind of info/advice you are looking for.

I have a sata drive in a usb 2.0 external enclosure (eagle consus) that I got from the local computer store. Works fine. I hit the power button on it when I want it on or off. No fan, don't know about self-power up or down capabilities. Cheap and reliable (arohudn $20).

Thank you for the tips, it was a busy week with my wife's dad having a heart attack (doing relatively OK now, he has had questionable mental stability for years) and other things happening.

A $50 two drive enclosure from Rosewill on newegg caught my interest. It would be nice to be able to add another drive at some point, and from what I have seen it is cheaper to buy new larger capacity SATA drives compared to the IDE options. That directron site does look interesting.
edit: this <http://www.directron.com/st0009u.html > looks nice. It can hold up to 1TB drives and has an "Active SMART Cooling System", just will not work on my win2k system and I am fine with that I think. The only reason the old external was on that system was my increasingly f**ked up XP install that is much better now after a reinstall.
one of those enclosures + a 500 GB drive from that site costs less than $100. Seems like yesterday when a 420 MB or so drive cost in the 300-400 dollar range.