The Sabrent “IDE + SATA to USB + ESATA” 3.5″ Enclosure

Note: I use IDE, EIDE and PATA interchangeably throughout this article, even though they aren’t technically the same thing. They look alike, but PATA is the faster version used today.  In all actuality, IDE, EIDE, SATA, etc. are all variations of the ATA standard (ATA1 – ATA7).

It began last week.

On my way home from school I stopped by Fry’s Electronics in Downers Grove.  We’re really lucky to have such a large electronics store nearby, though I’ll admit I’m finding it less and less useful.  I have nothing good to say about Fry’s but that’s not the subject of this post.  I really just wanted to warn everyone about how unfathomably awful this drive enclosure I bought is.

Firstly, I specifically bought it because it said “IDE+SATA to USB+ESATA.” Perhaps they should have clarified what that meant a little better.  It doesn’t convert IDE (or PATA, if you will) to ESATA, even though it wouldn’t be hard to do so.  PATA and SATA are both based on the same standard – conversion between the two would not be tough, nor expensive.  A good case in point is the $10 adapter I bought.  It doesn’t really contain much circuitry at all, and does a damn good job at converting between the two. I benchmarked it before and after and saw no noticeable difference in speed.

Here’s what the enclosure does do (besides suck).  It converts SATA to eSATA which isn’t really a conversion anyway, it’s actually a passthrough.  It’s comparable to converting a small USB plug to a bigger one; you’re not really doing anything except changing what kind of plug it uses.  $39.95 is a little pricey for a little plastic, aluminum and an eSATA cord!  Ok ok, it does have a little extra value aside from that ‘conversion’. It also converts IDE or SATA to USB.

So why don’t I just settle for USB?

You might ask why I want to use eSATA versus USB.  Really, the answer is simple: speed.  USB 2.0 has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 60 megabytes per second.  My PATA hard drive has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 133 megabytes per second.  So I’d be bottlenecking the hard drive transfer rates by using USB 2.0.  On the other hand, SATAII has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 300 megabytes per second.  Sata2 is what we’re using here, but even if it was sata1 we’d still be talking about more than 133MB/s.

Wait – there’s more!

There are other reasons why this is the most substandard enclosure I’ve ever seen in my life. Have a look at these captioned pictures I took:

This enclosure scratched my hard drive! It’ll do the same to yours, just jam it in there – you’ll get it eventually. I didn’t have to use a hammer, but you might depending on the manufacturing differences between your drive and mine.

The stand just sucks. If you want your hard drive to fall off the desk or wherever you put it and break then you’ll love this enclosure. Those little foam things are supposed to hold it in I think, but they just fall off and leave sticky goo all over everything.

Assuming you don’t want to use their shitty stand (and you don’t) then you have to have it like this, otherwise the fan would be on the bottom! Had the fan been on the other side, the ports would be right-side-up in this picture. There are also no rubber feet or anything on this POS, so you can count on this thing slipping around your desk and eventually falling off.

As you can see, there’s not much room inside the enclosure. Certainly not enough to put my relatively small IDE to SATA adapter on my hard drive – and beleive me, I tried. Whatever adapter you use, it won’t work – trust me. It just boggles the mind how they could leave this functionality out.

EDIT:  As I’m coming back into this post to edit things, I’m realizing things I’ve forgotten that suck about this drive enclosure and putting them in wherever I can.  One thing I should mention that I’m remembering right now that seems appropriate here is the built in indicator LED’s.  There are two of them on the front, one indicates power and the other disk activity.  If you do plan on using eSATA you won’t be able to see the disk activity LED working, because it isn’t hooked up to the SATA passthrough.

There are more pictures to come farther down, but you haven’t seen anything until you’ve read the manual.  These people can’t spell, use grammar, or really do anything right for that matter.  The manual is utterly worthless. The illustrations are also very well done, as you’ll see.  Here it is, in its entirety:  (I made the images a little larger because people complained that they couldn’t read the text in the images.)

Are those official trademarks at the bottom? Also notice it does say “USB & SATA to IDE” which would mean that it’s not a passthrough, but… it is. I also recall seeing something about IEEE 1394 on the back, but there isn’t a firewire port on the enclosure. Weird. At first glance I thought there were no misspellings/grammatical errors on the cover but I didn’t read the black circle: “Please strongly reccomend reading the MANUAL before using the product!” So I guess I’m supposed to go around and reccomend that people read this manual; well isn’t it ironic, that’s exactly what I’m doing by posting it here! Unless MANUAL is an acronym for something else…

Man, there’s a lot of capitalization in here. “Portable Device Disk extrnal [sic.] enclsoure [sic.]. In the next sentence there’s a comma directly before a word, and another misspelling “lightweigh[t].” I’ll just list the rest of the words: detact, enclsoure, thru, you … u, Mp3 FILES (is files an acronym?), applicarion, vidos, wtf? I can’t keep going. In response to the last sentence “read the manual carefully…”: Oh, I will – many times over. What I can understand anyway.

Some of this stuff looks like whoever wrote it was on something, and just didn’t give a $h17. I’ll let them get away with “programme” but some of this stuff is completely un-explainable. By the way, my first “PC” or IBM PC at least was a pentium 133 – a hewlett packard that broke many, many times and eventually got refunded. I miss that machine.

See, they spelled enclosure differently here. This time it’s “enclsoute” and you connect it “thru” the USB port. That part kind of threw me off because I didn’t know what I was supposed to plug it into after I got it thru the USB port, eventually I figured it out though.

ROFLMAO! I love this page! “You’d better connect the Hi-speed device to the Hi-speed USB2.0 port…” Oh yeah? Well you’d better watch how you talk to me. I don’t really like being given unsolicited advice by someone I just bought something off of.

Whopping??? USBcable – that must be a new compound word or something. I’m interested to know what XP theme they used in this screenshot – it looks awful minimalist. Also, if you look below that tooltip screenshot there’s actually a start menu above those last two sentences (yeah, that’s what it is) and it looks exactly like that in the actual manual, it’s not some kind of artifact or reflection or imaging problem on my part.

Usually when I whop the device out the wrong way it’s ok. I suppose if you were writing data to the drive and you unwhopped it you may have an issue, but whopping never caused my computer to crash.

The only reason why this page has less errors is because there’s less written on it, and therefore there’s less room to make errors. They did a good job at starting the title for the next page at the bottom of this one, but I’m sure that was intentional. I’m the one who’s wrong surely, I can’t be right this many times in a row.

Great screenshot… it looks almost like an installsheild extracting before the setup process but I can’t tell.

The one page that they could have possibly not done wrong, the #&!@^ up. Nice job guys – I hope some EU official sees this and bans their products from being imported/exported. Well, that’s the end folks. A pretty good read wouldn’t you say?

Well that’s the end of the manual, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.  It was the one thing that took the edge off of my frustration with this piece of shit.
Here’s some more images I took while I was messing around with it:

Sata drives do work OK in it. I happened to have a spare 80GB laying around and thought I’d try it out, sure enough it worked.

This is what I was trying to use to make the enclosure do what it was supposed to do to begin with, but it didn’t fit. Even if it did fit, it didn’t work – i tested it without putting everything in and it seemed like the adapter and the enclosure didn’t get along very well. Probably racial tension between the green and red PCB’s.

Here’s what the bottom of it looks like. If there’s one good feature on this thing it’s the fan, but they screwed it up too because it doesn’t really cause any airflow whatsoever. It’s pretty much flush against the hard drive. I’m sure it would break in a month or two and get really loud and annoying.

Here’s some of the other stuff you get in the box. USB cable, eSATA cable, short IDE and SATA cable, screwdriver, mounting screws, etc. The back of the box said what it included, but left out the part about the SATA cable so I thought I had to buy one, which I did. I returned it with the drive.

Don’t waste your money buying garbage like this.  Most of these enclosures try to mislead you into thinking they will let you use eSATA with your PATA drive, but they won’t. I guess that’s one problem that a lot of enclosures have, they appear to be IDE to eSATA but they aren’t. I’m sure there is one out there that does actually do the conversion but PATA/IDE/EIDE enclosures are becoming pretty rare to begin with these days.  Unfortunately this one has more problems than not converting EIDE to eSATA, and so does the company.  The manual was laughable at best.  I don’t even understand how something like this could happen.

I also contacted the company through their website for support several days ago.  I haven’t received a reply yet.  I would have called them, but they don’t have any contact info except for that lousy web form that you can’t even read because the text is too small and in a non-standard font.  I’m probably going to do some more research into the company and post my findings.  They sound like a bullshit foreign company that just tries anything to make money. I’m done with Sabrent unless I need some cheap adapter that you can’t go wrong on and they are the only option.