StarTech.com 3.5" External SATA Hard Drive Enclosure - Trayless - eSATA / USB 3.0 (USB 3.1 Gen 1) Hard Drive Enclosure w/ UASP , TAA (S351BMU33ET)

High quality product.

Very good design and it works very well as with other products of this company. The only problem that it is not designed to support HDDs over 4Tb, which is a bit "outdated" by today's standards. Otherwise, it is perfectly OK.

I had researched enclosures for my data backup drive. I had looked several varieties read reviews and such. While this enclosure did not have a lot of reviews, I had owned several other Startech products from seven foot network racks, to wall mounted racks, cloners and other items. So I decided this would be a great new item to try out. Packaged well, had both an esata cable and 3.0 usb cable in the box. I coupled the enclosure with a WD Blue 4 tb drive and the drive and enclosure worked well together. I have completed my much needed always on local backup- instead of the once a week backup on a portable drive. I feel this will get the job done until I can put in a NAS and I am using Blazebackup as my offsite backup solution. So in short, this enclosure helps bridge the data backup for local storage and will work well for most people. I did not test this with a 2.5 SSD, as that was not an option until the price of SSDs over 4tbs comes down.

Technically seems not bad. But the non-technical quality is terrible. There is disgusting smell upon opening the enclosure: toxic VOC there.

I've learned a lot recently about what chipsets actually offer low level access and it seems only the Asmedia chipsets do, and this is one of them. Startech actually listed which chipsets are on which product, and I decided to test my new knowledge, and sure enough, this product offers low level direct block access. Awesome! I'm literally hooked and loyal forever now. Thank you

I have been running three of these for many years. There was a bad power glitch and one died (along with some other equipment.) The other two are still going strong. I was able to buy the exact same unit as a replacement and it's now running happily alongside the others. The blue lights are a slightly different color is all.

The chassis, external power adapter, eSATA cable, and USB 3.0 cable all have good fit and finish, and feel solid. Drives slide in and out with minimal fuss. The product works flawlessly with Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD. But there is a major design flaw -- no cooling fan. I planned to use the enclosure for backups, cloning, etc., and knew that drives could be at 100% utilization for hours on end. During initial testing, I saw high drive drive temperatures in a matter of minutes. So, I decided to open the enclosure and see if I could add a fan. What I found is that StarTech had already done most of the engineering (!). The injected-molded plastic rear panel includes fan mounting hole and grill features, but they are not punched through. The printed circuit board is notched to accommodate a fan and has through-holes for installing a 2-terminal 0.1" pin header near where the fan should be. Mechanically, everything is there. But electrically, one PCB through-hole is connected to DC common, the other PCB through-hole seemed to be floating, and DC positive is soft-switched on the PCB (not directly by the on/off switch). I decided to complete the rear panel features, install a fan, install a pin header, and hot-wire the floating pin to the incoming power connector DC positive. Beyond voiding the warranty, I knew that hot-wiring the fan pin could back-feed electronics and that I risked bricking the unit. I got lucky -- the electrical hack worked. The fan spins whenever the external power adapter is connected, regardless of the position of the on/off switch. The important thing is that drive temperatures now stay reasonable during continuous use.Even though I succeeded with the case mod/ electronics project, I would prefer that StarTech finish their engineering/ manufacturing and sell an enclosure with a working cooling fan.

This external drive enclosure is well designed. The front access door allows easy removal of a 3.5" SATA drive. The blue thin LEDs on the front face are very helpful to show when the drive is powered up and whenever data is being accessed. However, the one big flaw is that 2.5" drives will not work in this enclosure. I had to buy a 2.5"-to-3.5" converter tray in order to use my 2.5" SSD. It would be nice if they included this type of tray for free so that you can use either your 2.5" or 3.5" SATA drives with this enclosure.