Home > Consumer Reviews > Sabrent SBT-EKU25 Ultra Slim USB 2.0 2.5-inch IDE/PATA Hard Drive Enclosure (Black)

Over all, I'm happay with the purchase. It performed everything the brief add that comes with it stated it would. My drive fit easily and snugly into the housing and the interface adapter worked perfectly.
I did have a few small troubles though.

THE HOUSING
The rear, plastic cap, that inserted easily with a snap of connectors, prevented the drive from sliding all the way into the metal housing sleeve thereby preventing the adapter from also going all the way into the opposite end of the metal sleeve and snapping securely.
No amount of fidigiting resolved this issue and after 7 minutes I gave up opting instead to simply leave the adapter and 1/8' of the end of the drive sticking out of the sleeve.
This in no way, hampered the performance though.
Resolution of this issue lies in the manufacturing hands of the plastic end cap.

THE USB ADAPTER
The USB cables included with the housing were functional as well though a bit confusing at first. There are two plug heads on the end that attaches to the drive and one on the end that attaches to your computer.
One head did not work with my "data damaged" drive and only after fiddeling with the device and computer software uneffectively for several minutes, did it occure to me to try the other head.
It worked immedietly.
I blame this issue on the flimsy instruction documentation.

THE DOCUMENTATION
Was poorly written, broken english and terrible structure. Some parts took re-reading several times to get the meaning of what was written. In all, I found it to be useless and in fact, reletively un-necessary since in my situation, the data recovery software I used supplied all the necessary connection and communication work.

All in all... I highly recomend this product for temporary, one time data recovery use.
Handyman454

Attractive little case, and since it was for the small 2.5 inch footprint, it was just the PATA-USB interface logic and small enough to carry in a pocket.

Note for users (maybe a tip, really): most of the time the drive spun up okay on the USB's limited power, but one time it wouldn't spin up and mount, so I held the drive horizontally and gave a minor twist in two directions. This moved the tiny stator just enough to allow the motor to spin up and properly mount to my laptop.

Check that the drive is not attached to the IDE connector upside down, since there is nothing that indicates which way is up until you attempt to slide on the enclosure. The enclosure won't fit if the drive has been plugged into the connector upside down.

If you test a drive without using the enclosure, as I did, and cannot read the disk, then the drive may be upside down (or set to be a slave, or a master with slave, or the drive or connector might be defective).

First check that the enclosure will slide on as designed. If it does slide on at least you know that it's connected correctly and you've got other problems.

Other than that, the unit is sturdy and once you get the tiny screws in the holes it is easy to assemble. I wouldn't recommend dropping a screw on a shag rug though.

I picked one of these up to try and pull some data off a dead/dying 2.5" drive from a friend's laptop. Worked well, better than I expected actually. Even though the drive was physically broken inside, I was able to copy over 95% of the data off a 10GB partition without a hitch, and fairly quickly.

I liked this product a lot. It did what I needed it to do. I was able to get all my files from my old laptop and move it to the new laptop. This product only cost me about $10 at the time which is much less than other and it did just fine. I only gave it 4 stars instead of 5 because I used it only a couple of times for transferring files. I don't know how it will hold up as a back up drive that is being used regularly. Anyways, it was well worth what I paid for it.