Infosafe 2.5 Sata To USB 2.0 On-the-go Drive Enclosure

List Price: $36.00 Discount Price: $17.61

Features:

• Product #: SATCASE25OTG
• Manufacturer: Startech.com
• Manufacturer Item #: SATCASE25OTG
• UPC: 065030819459

Customer Reviews:

Good enough but could be better [Posted on 2006-10-08]
I bought this device to capture pictures from my Camera on a trip to Africa. I ended up taking over 5000 photos and stored all of them on this device.

My configuration:
Connecting Device: Digital Camera Cannon S3 IS
Connecting Device: USB 1.1 Card Reader UCR-61
Memory Card: 1GB Brand Unknown SD Card P/N SD-M01G
Memory Card: 4GB Transcend SD Card TS4GSD150 (150x)
Memory Card: 8GB CF (My friends)
Hard Disk: 80GB 7200rpm Hitachi Travelstar HTS721080G9SA00
Battery Case: No-name included with enclosure
Batteries: "RECHARGE.ABLE" 2500mAh Ni-MH from Walmart
Power Supply: 5v included with enclosure

Overall: Acceptable with limitations.

Good: Very small and compact. Worked pretty well and did what it was supposed to. Transferred pictures as advertised. Worked as a normal USB hard drive. If they did a firmware update to fix the lockups, it would be highly recommended.

Bad:
Occaisionally when transferring with the 4GB card from the camera (USB 2.0) the device would lock up and not complete the transfer. I'm guessing that this is speed related since the card's specified read speed is 22.5MBs (180Mbps). When I dumped the same card from the USB 1.1 reader it worked fine. In fact, it never locked up when using the USB 1.1 card reader.

When using the USB 1.1 card reader the performance was horrible. 1 1/4 hours for the 4GB card and 2 1/2 hours for the 8GB card. Reliable but slow.

The battery case only provided juice for 15-20 minutes. Since I was using a 7200 RPM drive, it would start clicking when it wasn't getting enough power. And no, the lockups described above weren't related to power. When they happened I was using my friends 80Wh monster battery. The battery case was poorly designed and it was difficult to position the batteries so you could close the lid. The lid release was hard to press. Unfortuntately, you can't gang multiple battery packs together. A nice feature would be a voltage regulated battery pack that would take 6 or 8 batteres. Then you could run them till they were nearly dead instead of just until they wouldn't hold 5v.

In order to do the data transfers from the USB connection camera/card reader the enclosure requires that the drive be formatted using FAT32. Unfortunatly, WinNT kernels (WinNT, Win2K, WinXP, Vista) are artificially limited to only formatting 32GB. In order to fully format FAT32, you have to use either Win9x (Win95/Win98/WinME), Linux/Unix/BSD, or some Win9x version of DOS. Win98 and before won't recognize the USB interface so you are stuck with WinME (I used a virtual machine) or Linux . StarTech does not provide Win9x drivers. When I first got the enclosure, my drive had previously been formatted as NTFS. I used WinME in a virtual machine. I reformatted using the existing NTFS partition (no fdisk). That would appear to work when the drive was acting as a USB hard disk but as soon as I transferred pictures from the camera or card reader the FAT on the drive would be corrupted (garbabe file names, garbage directory names). StarTech tech support couldn't offer any suggestions other than "it should work". And they didn't understand the WinNT problem. Eventually, I deleted all the partitions on the drive, repartitioned it, and formatted it. Then everything was fine.

The 5v power supply was great. Spun the 7200 rpm drive right up (it frequently won't start on USB power, even with the double USB connector). And perhaps more importantly, it has a wide range of input power, 50-60Hz and 100-250V, so no problems with international power.

It was hard to know when it was done tranferring files, since the only indication it was done, was the lack of a blinking data light (green). If for example, you left it alone using the battery case and came back 1/2 hour later, the drive would have stopped spinning for lack of power (see 15-20 min limitation above) and the green light would still be lit. No way to know if you got all the files before the hard disk quit. Also, when the data transfer to the camera would lock up, or the drive would spin down (or not spin up) there was no indication of an error. In fact, the only time the error LED (red) ever came on was when I hadn't connected the USB cable. Some better status would be very nice (success and fail).

Would I do it again? Probably not. I bought this primarily because I had a SATA 2.5" hard disk laying around. For only a bit more money you can get a wolverine with a status LCD including the hard disk.

If you get a wolverine, make sure you get one that transfers fast, we had three in our party. One that could read cards and display pictures (nice big color display), one that only had transfer status LCD (fast) and another one with only transfer status LCD (slow). The slow one transferred at about USB 1.1 speed. Beware. The internal batteries were a pain, i.e. only good for about 20-30 minutes (see USB 1.1 speed for 4GB & 8GB above).

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