Home > Consumer Reviews > 3.5in USB 2.0 Hd Ion-drive Enclosure with Cables

I wrote this review in response to another review about the "problem with Windows 2000 Pro". I had this IOGEAR GHE135U enclosure with my old hard drive (ATA66) with Windows 2000 Pro SP3, it has no problem at all. The Windows 2000 found it and installed it as "Disk Drive" at very first time when connecting it. About this, it is also clearly stated at its manual..."no driver need for ME, 2000, XP". The only thing I don't like is the extra external power adapter; however, I beleive it is a must in order to provide the extra voltages for the regular hard drive (12 Volt/5 Volt). I like the big switch in the front panel, which allow me to just turn if off (after I 'Stop' it at the OS) without need to unplug it.

I was interested in making use of an extra hard drive I wasn't using, and realized that I could purchase a drive enclosure like this one and have a nice semi-portable storage device. So I did some research and learned that there are quite a few companies that manufacture them.

I purchased Iogear's version because of the perceived professionalism of Iogear's products (nice form factor, decent web site, etc.). Unfortunately, after receiving this device a few days ago, my experiences are mixed.

The installation of my extra hard drive into the enclosure was fairly simple. They have a nice little booklet that describes the process and all you need is a phillips head screwdriver. Once I got the drive in the enclosure, things went downhill.

There is a glaring error in the manual on how to install the software (it tells the user to double-click a setup file that's not even on the entire CD, let alone the root). Also, even though Windows 2000 detected the drive and started installing a driver, the driver was unsigned and after a mandatory reboot, I still could not access the drive. I then proceeded to do a whole series of Windows updates, as they suggest in the manual, and tried reinstalling the drivers, but still no luck.

I'm currently waiting for a response from Iogear on this issue. The problem reporting form on their web site has an ASP error (bad sign) so I emailed their "sales support" email address. We'll see if they respond in an appropriate amount of time and can resolve this issue.

Fortunately, all I had to do on my secondary computer (Windows Me) was to plug the drive into a USB port. Windows Me detected the drive, installed a generic driver (that didn't require the Iogear CD) and seconds later I was able to access the drive and copy files to and from it...even without a reboot!

In summary, this drive may have compatability issues with Windows 2000 but on a Windows Me system it worked fine (at least for me).