Antec MX-100 3.5-Inch USB Aluminum Enclosure for SATA Hard Drive
by Antec
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List Price: Our Price: $23.00 You Save: $21.99 (49%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Antec MX-100 3.5-Inch USB Aluminum Enclosure for SATA Hard Drive
Customer Review: Really Good...If you get a good one.
Summary: 4 Stars
Dealing with Antec, you either get something DOA or it works exceptionally well. They seem to make good products, but just have awful quality control. I had a bad experience with a hard disk cooler where 4 out of 5 of the units purchased or replaced were defective!
I've had one of these enclosures for a couple years now. It sees pretty light use, only really for backups occasionally. However it's never had any issues and I liked it so much I bought the same model when my wife needed an external drive. However, after 2 hours her unit had a drive light malfunction. I believe I read somebody else reviewing with that issue. It was likely due to really poor work on the connector. The wires were loose. That said, the computer never lost the drive and the enclosure continued to function without the light. Normally, I might not have even cared, but the WD Green drive that went into it was extremely quiet, so the light makes it much handier to judge activity.
Amazon has such an incredibly customer focus it wasn't a big deal. I just did the RMA process on a Friday morning, got my replacement part 2 day shipped (for free) the following Monday. My only hassle was slapping a pre-paid mailing label on the original box and taking it to the post office. It's treatment like that that keeps me coming back to Amazon again and again.
I docked it a star for my light issue, but I'd still recommend the product. As long as you have room on your desk to let air flow around the thing, it dissipates heat rather well and really does about all you can expect a USB enclosure to do. If it gets hot, using a fan to blow air across it drops the temperature pretty fast.
Customer Review: One of the best I've seen, with one problem.
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought four of these from Amazon, after having bought one from a store. I liked it very much, and the price was good. I don't buy ready-made external drives, because the come with preloaded annoying software. The Antec looks great, but the passive cooling takes the cake. I will never buy another fan-cooled enclosure, not only for the noise, but the fans are short lived, which may kill your hard drive.
The power supply is a downer, I would prefer a slightly larger enclosure with the power supply built-in. This one takes space from the power strip or outlet, depriving me of another receptacle.
I have all my media on this hard drive, and I hooked it up to a recently purchased Samsung LED TV, with built-in media player and USB port.
My major grief is that this device powers off unpredictably when not in use. I never turn it off, and I can see the light on for days at a time, but sometimes the light disappears, even if the power switch is on. This causes my Samsung to go berserk when I try to watch TV and I forget to check if the Antec light is on. It took me a while to figure it out, I was ready to return my TV to the store, when I accidentally found that the Antec power switch was on but the power indicator light was off. I turned the power switch off, and the TV behaved.
I own a Buffalo enclosure as well, which turns on and off automatically with the computer. Antec should use such smart circuitry. The Buffalo has other shortcomings, for which I still prefer this Antec.
I would give it five stars if it had the signal auto-sensing feature, or at least stay always on and stop being a smart-ass.
Customer Review: Sleek, quiet unit with potential heat/spin-down issues
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a beautiful, well-made external case.
It fits snugly into its stand, has a bright-white but non-obtrusive front-mounted white logo activity LED. The metal case conducts heat out from the drive without a noisy fan like the one in it's sister product, the Antec MX-1 USB/e-SATA 3.5-Inch Hard Drive Enclosure
The parts fit together seamlessly and take little effort to take apart and put back together (if you've worked with drive cases much you know how rare this is).
So what's to not like?
This unit doesn't seem to spin down the encased drive, unlike other USB cases which usually spin down on inactivity.
That doesn't make a lot of sense considering a USB-attached drive is likely some sort of auxillary or backup storage and won't be used constantly. I tested on two systems, one running FreeBSD and one with Windows. However, the drive did spin-down when the host unit was powered off or was put into standby.
The case gets warm, especially in light of the lack of spin-down, more so if you don't use the stand and have the unit lying on its side. In a hot room, this will certainly reduce the lifespan of the encased disk.
For high-bandwidth needs, the USB2 connection to this unit might be too slow, you may be better served by the MX1's eSATA connection. Or Firewire. Or the upcoming USB3.0...
None of those issues are major, but together they warrant a 4 instead of 5 star rating.
Recommended.
Customer Review: Backing up Windows Home Server
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought two of these to house drives to backup my HP EX475 MediaSmart Home Server (AMD Live, Windows Home Server, 1 TB Hard Drive). I'm still giving them 5 stars, but I'll share a couple of tips for using them. There is a power wire running from one end cap to the other. It took me a moment when I opened the first one to figure out I needed to disconnect it to remove the end cap for my drive installation. After the drive was attached, reconnecting the wire took a minute, but it wasn't hard. The wire has a 3 pin connector that was easy enough to connect and disconnect.
The bright white Bat Light drive use indicator is OK for me too, and the unit is quiet with a 1TB WD drive in it. One other thing - one of the enclosures didn't ship with a USB cable. I had plenty at home so except for the fact that I spent 10 minutes looking for the cable, it wasn't a problem but the company should do a better job of QA.
I still give the enclosure a five start review, because it's doing exactly what I need it to do.
One more tip. I put my drive in the enclosure, and while I saw it get added as a USB device, it didn't show up as a new drive. It took me a little bit to realize that the OEM drive I bought didn't have a partition on it, so I had to create the partition and do a quick format. I've done this in the past, but it took me awhile to remember that the drive probably was truly bare.
Customer Review: Simple and elegant - a winner!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is just what I want in a product: no-fuss assembly, works as it should, and the customer support I needed was outstanding.
I salvaged the 1TB hard drive from my dead Apple Time Capsule, bought the Antec MX-100, and had it installed and running in minutes. The MX-100 was an open-box buy, which was fine except that some screws were missing; thanks to great help from Antec, I now have everything secured.
It's too early to talk about reliability, but so far there has not been the slightest problem. I did have to partition the drive again, but that went smoothly and it is now running unnoticed as my Time Machine backup. It is connected via USB, which is much faster than my previous wireless Time Capsule link. There is no evident conflict with Apple protocols.
One note on component reliability. Apple uses high quality drives in the Time Capsule, with mean time between failure rates in the million hour range. Unfortunately, the Time Capsule enclosure is not so durable; when mine failed, I checked on the web and found that failures in the 18-month time frame (so in the 15,000 hour range) are common, which really disqualifies the Apple product for backup you can bank on. My guess is that the MX-100 enclosure will do a lot better, but even if I am not so lucky, swapping to a new enclosure would be simple, and a good deal cheaper than a replacement Time Capsule.