Pros: good mechanical fit, good looks, generally good workmanship, no fan to go bad or get noisy. Cons: no fan for cooling, circuit board quality seems generally good but the solder job on the fine pitch pins of the controller ASIC isn't very good, several pins look very close to shorted. The advertising promotes the aluminum case as an advantage for cooling, but the hard drive sits in a plastic tray with just some vent slots, and that sits inside the aluminum case which has very small vent slots on one end. The plastic is going to do a good job of insulating the drive; I would not use this enclosure for a drive that was being worked really hard, but for most desktop uses it should be OK. All that said, I am happy with the two that I bought to use the eSATA connections into a laptop docking station. See my photo for notes on the instructions. Rubber feet are already installed, and one extra screw of each type is provided. There are no screws under the rubber feet which are preinstalled, you only need to use 2 of the black screws and 4 of the silver screws, so the image of the parts bag in the instruction sheet is misleading.

For the longest time I had been buying Sabrent accessories but recently I have been experiencing a wide range of sub-par performances from their devices so I decided to look for a new maker of accessories. The first I tried out was a Mediasonic ProRAID which from the pictures looks nice and sleek but their instructions are garbage. It took me a while to set up the RAID and once it was set up, the hard drives never spun down, not sure if this was a problem for me specifically since it was connected to a NUC but 2 3.5 inch hard drives spinning all day without being accessed is a waste of electricity. Then I found this guy which reminded me of an old SIIG enclosure I had and gave away, so I gave it a try. The device was detected right away as USB Device instead of Final Lap To Go or some other junk, read and write speeds seemed pretty normal for an external enclosure, and most importantly the hard drive spun down into its low power state while being connected to this NUC. So far I have not found a single issue in terms of the enclosure that makes me want to lower its rating. It does not have a fan but for the occasional access, the aluminum does a pretty good job to dissipate the heat. The hard drive is held in place by screws which I prefer to the tool-less which have to be stuffed with pieces of foam and what not to stop the hard drive from moving around. Overall I recommend this enclosure to everyone if you're looking for a 3.5 enclosure.

This Vantec enclosure works fine, was easy to install a drive into, and gave me no functional problems. However, I want to note two issues. The description seems to indicate that the enclosure is aluminum. Only the outer shell is. The actual drive sled and front grill are black plastic. The LED on the front is also very bright and recessed into the grill. When the drive is in use this blue LED shines ultra-bright, and flashes like a disco when the drive is being written to.

Excellent 3.5" USB 3.0 drive enclosure for a great price. There's no cooling fan to make any noise and the drive, itself is completely silent in this enclosure (of course, YMMV depending on the drive you put in it. I like the sturdy construction and it was very easy to install the drive. I am using it as an external drive for an Xbox One and it works flawlessly. Before that, I temporarily used it with my Mac and it was flawless there, too. If I have any complaint about it (and this is pretty minor) it's that the drive light on the front is REALLY BRIGHT, particularly when I having sitting in a Entertainment Center shelf on top of the Xbox. I put a piece of electrical tape over the area where the light is to help, but since the light is actually recessed behind the front "grill" of the enclosure, some light still leaks out around the sides of the tape (and I don't want to cover anymore of the front for fear of blocking too much air flow). Like I said, this is a pretty minor nit pick, so I'm giving it 5 stars anyway.

Very speedy when paired with Western Digital Caviar Blue drive. However, the enclosure has virtually no vibration isolation. The normal vibration of the disk mechanism causes it to vibrate... and cause audible vibrations when resting on my desk, even with the included rubber feet installed. The enclosed vertical stand, made of thin brittle plastic, is a complete no-go as it will rattle against the enclosure AND the desk, making absurd amounts of noise.

Would be a five-star item if Vantec put some isolation mounts into it.