USB 3.0 Enclosure for 2.5” & 3.5” SATA HDD/SSD – Tool-Free, UASP, LED Indicator, Plug & Play, Power Adapter & Cable Included – External Hard Drive Case for Windows/macOS/Linux (EC-KSL3)

This SATA HDD enclosure is perfect. I pulled it out of the box, pressed the single button to open the outer case, slipped in my 3.5" HDD, closed up the case, plugged in the USB cable, booted up the computer, and VOILA! The drive was instantly recognized and worked like a charm. I tried it with some smaller SATA drives and it also worked flawlessly. Because I was merely transferring data from old drives, I didn't bother screwing the drives into the enclosure. However, if you wish to do so (and I highly recommend that you do if you will be transporting this), there are screws and a screwdriver provided in the box. Sabrent couldn't have made this enclosure any easier! It's the best HDD enclosure I have owned (and I have had a number of different variations over the years). No more dodgy HDD toasters for me.

I bought the Sabrent ED-DFLT enclosure so that I could format various hard drives on my iMac. It's a rather long story, which I'll shorten to this: I confirmed that the Sabrent enclosure worked when I received it by using an old 2TB drive. I then tossed the box and waited for my 6TB Western Digital Caviar Green drive to arrive from Amazon a couple of weeks later. When plopped into the Sabrent, the new drive showed up on my Mac's desktop. I then set about creating a large encrypted disk image on the drive. It chugged away for 4 full days, seemingly working for the first 3. But after day 4, the formatting was clearly hung, and it had taken my Mac down with it. Upon rebooting, the drive no longer showed up at all. Disk Utility could not even see it. After a lot of detective work, too long to describe here, I confirmed that the 6TB drive was still working fine, but the Sabrent logic board had died, obviously a case of infant mortality. The good news: it can handle large capacity hard drives. The bad news: not for very long... And of course, since I tossed the boxing, there is no returning the Sabrent. I therefore spent $23 on a brick, although it won't break me. This case of infant mortality is probably just a fluke, but an annoying one when it happens to you. I should have kept the box a while longer. My bad. UPDATE 1/2118: To Sabrent's great credit, and this is going back about 2.5 years ago, they stepped in and replaced the enclosure, no charge. I tested it but ran into issues trying to do the above formatting again, and threw it on my junk pile. With hindsight, I'm now realizing that the issue was most likely the hard drive I was using, which I got by ripping open a Western Digital external hard drive and removing it. There's something odd about the firmware in these drives. They're just "not right" when taken out of their manufacturer's shell and fully exposed like this. I think my issue was the hard drive, and NOT Sabrent. Coupled with their excellent customer service, I've now increased the rating to five stars. Because ... I just bought some 8TB Hitachi hard drives and it was time to format them, again with encryption. These are new, bare hard drives from Amazon, not something I ripped out of an external HD box! Fortunately, I still had the Sabrent enclosure, so I pulled one off the pile, attached the 12V/1.5A power adapter to it, put the 8TB drive in, connected to my Mac Mini, and just like that, the hard drive mounted on the desktop. I formatted it in HFS+, then created a new encrypted disk image, and let it run. This time, all went well. I discovered that if you open Sierra's Activity Monitor and click on Disk Activity, you get a readout of how fast the data is moving across the interface. I was seeing it move between 110 - 160 MB/sec, averaging about 130 MB/sec. That's not bad at all on my 2012 iMac with a 4-core i7 processor running Sierra (12.6). It's not the fastest i7 there is, so you have to remember that there are calculations that first have to be made before the data can be spit out of the USB3 ports for writing. That takes time to execute, which has to slow transfers down somewhat. USB of any speed never hits its theoretical maximum anyway (4.8Gbps for USB3, or about 600 MB/sec). Considering I was getting only 25 MB/sec with USB2 on this same machine (theoretical maximum speed = 60 MB/sec), actual speeds are less than theoretical speeds by about the same factor for each version of USB. The full 8TB of writing took 17 hours, which averages out to 130 MB/sec, consistent with what I see in Activity Monitor. I would say that's pretty good. I'm happy. Side note: I got to wondering about Sabrent's advice to run a firmware update. I'm a Mac guy, but I have an old PC running XP. I thought I would take a stab at the upgrade. I downloaded it to the PC, but the update would not run at all. You tell it to RUN the update and nothing happens. My neighbor has a PC running Windows 10, so I took the dock, power supply, and a USB cable to his place. He downloaded the update to his PC, followed the .pdf instructions exactly, the interface presented is NOT what the .pdf shows, but tried running it anyway. Same issue: hit the RUN button and nothing happens. It doesn't freeze or anything like that. It simply does nothing. So much for that! The key point I'm making is that this same dock that I bought 2.5 years ago (August 2015) easily sees my 8TB drives, runs flawlessly, and runs quite fast, all with no firmware update whatsoever. I don't understand Sabrent's statement that older docks (2.5 years old?) without an update are limited to 4TB. Not mine! I do not understand why other commenters can't get it to work right. It works perfectly for me. Considering Sabrent's great customer support, excellent USB3 performance, full support for an 8TB drive, and it's very low price, I gotta give it 5 stars! UPDATE 1/30/2018: Plugging into two different iMacs running Snow Leopard (10.6.8), neither can see any drive plugged into it. Odd, since at one time it could/did. I don't know what the difference is, but if you're running Snow Leopard, you might consider passing on the Sabrent. UPDATE 2/12/2018: Okay, so the Sabrent isn't happy with Snow Leopard. Separately, I plugged the Sabrent into my 2012 Mac Mini w/i7 processor and running Sierra (12.6). I plugged a second, different external USB3 drive enclosure to another port, loaded a pair of 8TB X300 Toshiba hard drives in each, and proceeded to move data from one drive to the other. Measured speed is about 130 MB/sec, which is about max transfer rates that these hard drives can deliver. No complaints!

Works as described and is easy to use.

Works well, wires are long enough, and the case is nice. Wish there was an option to turn off the LED light though

This docking station works exactly as expected. It’s easy to set up—just plug in the hard drive, connect via USB 3.0, and it’s ready to use. Transfer speeds are very fast, and it recognizes both 2.5” and 3.5” drives without any issues. I like the lay-flat design; it keeps my desk tidy and makes swapping drives really simple. No strange noises or overheating so far. Overall, a solid and reliable tool if you need quick access to multiple HDDs.

I had an external Seagate drive stop powering on. I did everything I could think of to get it to power up again, had some stuff on it I didn't want to lose. As a laast ditch effort I got this Sabrent enclosure and busted the Seagate hard drive out of it's enclosure. This Sabrent enclosure worked! What a relief! Very worthwhile purchase.

EZ setup: Plug in power, slide in disk, connect supplied cable to USB port, turn on. Disk recognized and appears almost immediately in File Explorer (Win11 Pro). Searched old stored hard drives -- Samsung SATA SSD and two WD Hard Drives -- to find needed old files. Fast data travsfer. Recuva utility worked on all. SSD had to be inserted at a slight upward angle. Hard Drives slipped straight in. Drives heat up, but not abnormally.

Review of the Sabrent USB 3.0 to SATA External Hard Drive... It works. To use this, it helps to know a bit about computers, especially if your data or entire disc is protected with a password. You will need to figure that out to make this work. And you need to know for sure what type of disc you have. Are you sure it is SATA? Consider disc size (inches and MB or TB) and how much data you are attempting to transfer in a single run. I pushed the Sabrent to the limit for 3-4 hours with two large fast 3.5in discs transferring about 1TB of data through USB3. Both the external and internal discs started to overheat and slow down. I opened the computer case and the lid on the Sabrent and directed a floor fan toward them. The SATA drives were near 150 degrees when they started to slow down. The ambient temperature in the room was 87 degrees. After about 15 minutes of cooling with an external floor fan directed at the drives they had both cooled to about 100 degrees and transfer speed was up. I would suggest that you NOT run this with the lid closed. This will depend on which type of disc you have in the caddy but consider that the disc may heat up to HOT very quickly. Maybe OK for a few minutes. If you're working with 2.5in discs, probably heat will not be an issue. I was pushing a 2TB 3.5in SATA through USB. It worked but consider what I write below. It's basically just an expansion of what you just read. I might say bad design or bad documentation, but that's subjective. I was pushing this drive to the maximum for several hours. If used in a different way (incremental backups for example) the overheating would probably not be an issue and the lid could stay closed. Oh, wait. I do need to mention bad design. Please read on to the last paragraph. I was in the process of copying files from a 2TB 3.5in SATA drive through USB 3 to a 1TB 3.5in internal SATA drive. It was going well. I was transferring files from a caddy-mounted 3.5 inch disc through usb3 to a 3.5 internal SATA disc. I started with the video files. Idiot. Music will always be more important than movies. Anyway. While the videos were being transferred at about 50MB/s I started transferring all of my .mp3 files to the new computer. There was an obvious argument between the 2 copy processes. This is a Windows thing and has nothing to do with the Sabrent product that I am reviewing. After a minute or so they came to rest at an average of 50MB/s They did initially stop and reassess the situation to find a solution. Actually, the copy processes both stopped several times. I started to suspect heat failure in the target internal drive. All the fans were spinning at max revs. Yes, that one was at least 120 degrees on the HDD. I discovered that after turning off the machine and touching the manufacturer installed internal drive. I can't give you a computer-reported temperature but my hand is accurate. I'll tell you what though. That old 2TB hard drive from my 2010 computer got really hot in the CLOSED transfer bay of the Sabrent SATA to USB caddy. ~150-160 F. I guessed by hand measurement and with experience in determining temperature through touch. I would recommend STRONGLY that you leave the lid open while transferring data for more than 10 minutes. Oh. Yeah. The over heating disks. I took the cover off my computer and opened the lid on the Sabrent caddy. I have a strong floor fan blowing on them. It is probably at about 100 degrees now. The transfer is running faster. Had gotten down to about 5MB/s when it was really hot. Now it's at ~30MB/s The device has worked very well. You'll hopefully need to determine how to access your files once you attach the drive. If not, you need better security protocols. Just sayin'. OK. A couple hours later. I think every .mp3 and every movie has transferred. All of my other data has already been backed up.. I had to skip about 15 files from a 2TB disk. Not too bad. The file transfer would have been faster if I had enabled some auto button push thing. I randomly checked .mp3 files from 0 to Y. I don't have z in my .mp3 collection. Movies are working fine. After a ~40 file spot-check everything is working in all my files. As far as I can tell. Take the advice I never follow and make an image of your machine every couple weeks or more often. If you set that up correctly, it will basically be an incremental backup which would be the perfect use for this product. If your computer stops working and you have an image set up correctly, you can restore your computer in an hour rather than a few days. Then, take the image (or at least a backup of recent files) disc away from your house or office. You could hide it in your car or put it in a convenient place. If you buy this caddy, you will easily be able to do that. You will need to learn a lot about backups or imaging but it is worth the time. Oh. One last thing. For some reason there is a GIANT power button on the top of this thing. An actual working power button. Why? No clue. I am not sure if I've ever seen a power button on an external drive. Maybe on a ZIP drive? I don't think so. Just very poor design. I am being very careful to NOT push the GIANT power button on the top of this device while a VERY large file transfer is taking place. If I accidentally push the GIANT power button on the TOP of the device, I may need to start my whole file transfer process again. Just sayin'.