Do you have some old SATA hard drives hanging around that you aren’t using? Need to image a SATA hard drive but don’t have any way to connect said drive to your computer? Need data off an old SATA hard drive that you forgot to back up before you swapped it out for a shiny new drive? A USB SATA hard drive and solid state drive enclosure is something that is useful and extremely handy to have on hand for all of the aforementioned situations.
Recently I needed to retrieve some data off a hard drive from my old computer that was stored on a Western Digital Blue 3.5 inch 1TB hard drive. Or at least I thought the data was there. It wasn’t which was my fault and not Sabrent’s enclosure.
I really didn’t want to open up pr0metheus and hook up more power cables and a SATA cable just to get to that data so for $30 Canadian Loonies I picked up this USB3 enclosure by Sabrent off of Amazon. There are plenty of options on Amazon but I am a big fan of Sabrent’s M.2 NVMe SSD’s so I decided to go with them. At least there is a face to the company and someone to contact if something doesn’t work unlike so many of the other unbranded enclosures that you have to wade through on Amazon.
The drive comes well packed in in a cardboard box and besides the enclosure Sabrent includes a power supply, a (very robust) USB 3 Type B cable, some screws and an instruction manual.
The enclosure is pretty simple to use. The outer case is metal and the inner case is plastic. Inside the inner case you have the SATA connector. Out the back of the case you have the plugs for the power supply and the USB 3 cable. You also have a power switch that feels to be a very good quality.
The outer metal case slides off by pressing down on the spring-loaded round button on top (actually labelled with a faux power image). that round button also acts as the power status and activity light.
The enclosure itself is just large enough to fit a full size 3.5 inch hard disk drive. 2.5 inch mechanical or solid state drives fit easily. And both sizes can be easily screwed in to place with the included hardware if you wish to keep the drives installed long term.
The Sabrent EC-KSL3 is a USB 3.0 to SATA 3 drive enclosure compatible with SATA hard disk and solid state drives. USB 3 is fast enough to handle a high speed SATA solid state drive in theory and in my use it seemed to live up to that promise. Transferring files between my desktop (which runs on a Sabrent 4.0 NVMe SSD so it is not anywhere near the bottleneck in this case) and my WD Blue 7200RPM 1TB hard disk drive was only held up by the WD HDD.
I am very happy with the quality and performance of this enclosure and highly recommend the Sabrent EC-KSL3 to anyone who would like to use an old SATA hard drive as external storage or as an easy way to image an old hard drive. Or even as a backup drive for files on your computer.
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