Love it!  Works well via USB and eSATA.
348098
Very easy install - just make sure you have a small jewelers-type philips screwdriver.
Runs slightly warm to the touch but not hot.
I installed a Western Digital 500GB SATA drive in this enclosure and backed up my wife's Windows 7 laptop via USB in about 30 minutes.  USB transfer speeds topped out around 20MBps.  I then connected it to my desktop via eSATA and backed up that machine.  ESATA transfer speeds topped out at 88MBps.
I have an EVGA 650i Ultra motherboard and am able to hot-swap the drive via eSATA under Windows 7 with no problems (make sure to disable write-caching).  I can plug it in while Windows is running and the drive is recognized within 2 seconds.  When I unplug it, the drive goes away with no errors.  Windows is even able to remember that I set the drive letter to 'X' and shared it on my network - now when I plug it back in, it shows up as drive 'X' and is shared correctly.
FYI:  the blue light on the front is EXTREMELY bright.

I Highly recommend this enclosure.
1212904
I have this drive and also the 500GB version, connected to two different PCs each running Windows XP Pro SP2. Both drives are excellent although I will mention one caveat below about this 1 TB unit.

I have not experienced any of the problems mentioned in other reviews about booting or DOA. I wonder if the person with the boot problem reformatted the drive as a system drive or had other problems in BIOS setup.

The drives both installed easily and automatically. They come formatted for FAT32 which makes them compatible with earlier versions of Windows although it limits file sizes. Windows Disk Management easily reformats them to NTFS. Although the reformat takes several hours. You can continue using the PC itself, though, while the reformat proceeds.

Something unusual about the USB2 and eSATA interfaces. I tried the USB2 interface on both drives. I also tried the eSATA interface - in one case connecting to an eSATA port through a PCI card (and the PC has a 33 MHz PCI bus, not a 66 MHz PCI bus) and in the other case to a PCIx PCI Express interface. In both cases (!), the USB2 interface provided faster throughput than the eSATA interface. I believe the limitation is inside the PC, and NOT inside the drive. Nevertheless, it transfers about 1.6 GB in about 2.5 to 3.0 minutes. Plenty fast for my use. I now use the USB2 interface.

Note that the fancy although difficult to interpret white LED display in the front of the drive works with USB and FireWire although not with eSATA.

The 500 GB drive is super quiet all the time. The 1 TB unit is a bit odd. After accessing it, some time later it will sometimes make a low-level rapid clicking/whirring noise until the drive is again accessed at which time the noise stops. I actually replaced the 1 TB drive through WD and both drives did this. The drive passes the extended diagnostic test and WD says I am probably hearing a normal noise. I took it off the desktop and put it on top of the mini-tower so the noise no longer bothers me.

I use Acronis software to do disk image backups with these drives and also do simple backups of user folders through Windows. The drives makes this so easy.

I wholeheartedly recommend the 500 GB drive and also recommend the 1 TB unit although be aware of the possible noise.
1966901
My Desktop PC's Motherboard had quite a few unused SATA ports, This 2 PORT SATA to ESATA slot Plate did the trick to extend the on-board SATA ports to an external attached ESATA Hard Disk drive.

It is well built, The length of the cable is about 12 inches and long enough to reach the port connectors.

This thing does not have any active electronics, Just an connector extender, Do not expect any magic to happen. Whatever your motherboard's SATA port capabilities are will be extended to the external device that you connect.

It is a good buy! Highly recommended for extending you on-board SATA connectors to ESATA devices.
2790636
Fast and easy to use.  Has USB 3 and eSATA, so the interfaces are fast.  Shows disk activity, has a power button on top, which is helpful.  I recommend it.
3330318
Orico has built a top quality PC card here for adding USB 3.0 and eSATA to a PC that didn't originally have those ports.  The interface works well and the card works flawlesslyl.
1683871
This eSATA cable works extremely well with my computer and I am extremely satisfied with the performance. Using this cable makes it possible for me to use any SATA hard drive as full speed external storage as well as hard drive diagnostics.
2195663
I have had a VANtec NexStar USB2/eSATA dual bay docking station for years and it performs flawlessly. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the USB3/eSATA docking station. While the old one uses e/SATA connectivity in both bays, the new one (USB3/eSATA) does not, it only allows e/SATA connectivity in one bay. According to their tech support the fault lies with my PC. This was said despite the fact that the old one works perfectly well with both bays. I originally thought that something was wrong with the device itself and exchanged. Of course the second one failed the same way.
2363325
I received my second RMA'ed ST307504FPA1E2-RK FreeAgent Pro 750GB with eSATA/USB2.0 interfaces back from Seagate yesterday.

Originally purchased new in June, RMA'ed in August after giving up on getting it to work with eSATA. (To be fair, it did work for awhile on its USB 2.0 interface, but I would've stayed with my existing Maxtor external drives if I'd wanted a theoretically-slower USB interface; I wanted a faster eSATA interface). Multiple tries with three different brand x1 PCIe eSATA cards and multiple brands of eSATA cables on an AMD cpu homebuild with no eSATA on mobo, and then on a newer second Intel C2D Quad homebuild with two eSATA ports on the mobo backplate. First replacement unit had same system lock-up and random going-offline problems, as did this third unit (the second RMA replacement). First unit and its RMA replacement from Seagate were factory-sealed and marked as new; the third unit from Seagate was marked "Refurbished".

I have wasted way too much time and money on return UPS charges to Seagate and multiple eSATA cables and PCIe eSATA cards. Life is too short. Seagate's won. I give up. My spirit is broken. This pig will become a very stylish doorstop. When it gets cold here in another few weeks, I'll plug its power brick in again, and it'll serve as a wonderful stand-alone space heater and night light.

In post-mortem, though,... during this five-month fiasco, I've purchased two new OEM internal WD SATA-II drives (one 750GB the other 1TB) and put them in APRICORN EZ-BUS-DTS-EKIT Aluminum 3.5" USB 2.0 & eSATA External Enclosures. Both spun up the first time on the eSATA interface, they run very quiet and cool in these cases, I integrated them easily into XP Pro, and they've worked flawlessly since as rotating daily archival backup depositories.

Of course, as always,... "Your mileage may vary".  :)
4004526
I have used this product for over a year and have had absolutely zero problems. I use it on eSATA and USB 2.0. On eSATA, it is as fast as my internal SATA 2 Hitachi 7200 RPM drives on Windows XP Pro at both SP2 and SP3 levels. That is the promise of the eSATA interface, and this external drive delivers. Needless to say, it is much slower on USB as USB 2.0 is not nearly as fast an interface as eSATA.
The drive is almost silent and runs cool compared to most internal drives.
I can't comment on the software as I have never tried it.
Overall, I give this drive top marks for price and performance. It has the reliability I would expect of any Seagate product.
One reviewer did note that his unit failed when knocked over while operating. From 40 years of IS/IT experience, I can only say that with the exception of certain high end laptop drives there is a very high probability of drive platter damage if a drive is knocked over or dropped while it is operating regardless of the manufacturer.
4004627
I just got this enclosure , and so far I am very pleased. It came with very good instructions , and all cables and screws needed. I had it unpacked and 2 Western Digital 500GB Caviar Blues installed in 5 minutes. I'm taransferring 120GB of various data (movies,music,photos,etc.) as I type this.
That particular transfer is taking me 5 hours due to the fact that the tranfer is going over the network and this enclosure only uses USB. That is perfectly fine and is to be expected(for me)The only gripe I have is that the switch for JBOD/BIG is on the inside on the circuit board and not the outside , but no big deal. Other than that , I love it.  I am using this particular enclosure to plug into my Pogoplug.
Oh , yes , it works with Windows 7
368342
Great functionality, very quiet fan, well designed, great throughput with eSATA. Plays back my 4:2:2 HD material flawlessly using their Rocketcard eSATA card in a PowerMac. In RAID 5 it leaves you with about 5.5TB but I feel like I'm covered if one drive goes south. It's a bummer that I need to buy another one or find one that has the 3TB drives inside rather than the 2TB. Really appreciate the web interface to the drive. Well done all around. Highly reccommend.
3606870
I use this with my laptop and I absolutely love it. It works from a good amount of distance, and being able to have 1 USB receiver for the mouse and keyboard is a huge advantage. Highly recommended!
2547266
I'm really impressed with the performance of this little box from Dell.  I'm using it to connect two external 1920x1080 HD monitors, a keyboard, a mouse, a wired network, speakers, and an external hard drive.  I'm amazed it can do all this through one USB 3.0 port on my laptop (a Dell XPS 15).  So now instead of connecting/disconnecting six cables, I only have to do one!  Gotta love it...
100482
I've been using this drive for about a month now. Mostly I am quite happy with it.

This is a true eSATA drive and runs, on my system, about twice as fast the other external USB2 and Firewire drives that I have hooked to my main computers. As expected, it also seems noticeably faster than either of my external SCSIs - but have not actually measured the throughput on these drives.

It comes with a Promise eSATA controller which installs on the PCI bus. The  Promise card seems to have solid drivers as they installed with no problems or conflicts on my XPP/2 system, and have remained stable.

Two things keep me from giving this drive five stars.

First, the backup software shipped with it is bug-ridden, unstable, and crash prone. Though this does not detract from the drive (I have several other backup programs) it none-the-less is sold as part of the package, and needs to be considered if you do not have alternate software available.

I would give the included backup software NO stars, as it crashes so frequently that it is useless. This is noted on reviews on other sites as well, so it seems not something unique to my system. Why such poorly performing software is included is beyond understanding.

The other negative is the power switch.

The power switch automatically resets to the default "OFF" position when the mains power to the drive is cut. This switch must then be pressed (and held for a few seconds) when attempting to power the drive up again, and is successful only AFTER the computer has reached some (as yet to me unclear) point in bootup.

This might seem minor. However, I have two computers that I use as one - controlled by a KVM switch. Between them they have 10 external hard drives variously connected (video, and photography). If I had to restart each of these drives when starting my system it would take a significant amount of time to simply get the drives spinning. The other nine start when power is restored, this one does not: it just sits there cold, dead, unnoticed.

I have never seen such a needless "feature."

Almost invariably I forget to turn the drive on until I need it, for it is used only for backup of in-process videos/images. By then, if I have stuck in a USB keydrive, the drive letter assignment has changed (XPP does not seem able to actually reserve the letter I assign to the eSATA drive if a new keydrive is inserted) so then have to go and change the drive letter assignments so that my batch files will work.

Frustrating and needless interruption of workflow!

The power switch should simply stay in whatever position the user leaves it in. This irritates me almost enough to give the drive THREE stars, but it is better than that.

The lame power switch, and DOA software package, keeps this drive from warranting 5 stars; but, it is fast and large enough to be of use for even video-editing requirements.
3042242
I have been looking to upgrade my DVR capacity for some time but have been unable to find a decent external esata hard drive. I bought this internal one and an external enclosure for an extra $25 and it worked great on plugin and reboot. Now I have hundreds of hours of space and the guides/lists come up and navigate much more quickly. I don't know if it will work in all DVRs but it works in a DTV HR21.
1690246
Very solid feeling case and inside a Hitachi HDT721010SCA360 as reported by the BIOS (eventually).  At first the drive was not seen when used in eSATA mode despite the correct drive first, then PC power up procedure. I used the included cables (my PC only had internal SATA ports) and adapter. Nothing, but USB mode worked fine, so it was not the HD itself.

I remembered reading a previous review about the cables not fitting right, and I held them in tight while booting but still no luck. I noticed that the socket on the HD's enclosure side was a little small looking, so finally I took a sharp knife and cut a small bevel on the soft gray plastic outside portion of the eSATA plug that fits into the drive itself, and sure enough that was it! But really Cavalry, shipping a drive with a cable that doesn't actually fit with its own HD ? Knock off one star for that.

So far I tried four several hundred GB backups using eSATA and Acronis, of which two failed with the dreaded "Corrupted archive" (or words to that effect). I have never seen that for any USB drives I have used with the same program, nor did I see that for the two USB mode backups I subsequently (re)made. A small sample, I know, but still, 50% failure in eSATA mode?  Are the cables really too long for the motherboard's internal SATA port, or is there an eSATA issue with the HD? I can't tell, but knock off another star for the in my mind now unreliable eSATA interface, which is what I bought this drive for in the first place....
4239372
I use it for the esata to copy to offline storage my nightly backup files which are all on the order of 5-10 gig files. I achieve full sata speed which tends to be 70-110 mb/sec depending on the cylinders being used. HDtune shows the same benchmarking graph for a drive I had installed internally vs. when in the doc. The fastest is my 2tb seagate while a 300 gig maxtor is only half as fast - but it's the drive that's slow, not the dock.

The best I can get with USB is about 25-30 mb/sec, which is all I've ever got using usb drives on several machines. The limit is in the usb interface. A few seem to run at about 20 and the fastest at about 30. Having the usb is important since it works on any machine pretty much.

The one problem I've had is that I can't turn the unit on when I'm playing any sounds. It crashes my system. But this is likely my pci express x1 interface drivers for my esata card. I have a JMicron Technology Corp jmb36x card.

I did have to trim back the connector going to the esata card as mentioned in a comment. Apparently, this unit does not abide by the spec for esata cables which calls for a recessed female socket (which is designed with the external aspect of the interface in mind). Once I did that, it works reliably. Before I trimmed it, any movement of my computer would tend to dislodge the cable at the computer end.