External drives are indispensable when it comes to transporting large amounts of data or having a means of portable storage for backup. There's no doubt that USB flash memory drives are hard to beat when it comes to small and lightweight, but sometimes they just don't offer enough capacity. And traditional hard drives have a much better cost per gigabyte ratio than anything based on flash memory. True there are also cons, such as susceptibility to vibration and shock, the generation of heat and higher power consumption, but if you need more than 100GB or so of space there's really not much alternative.


The SATA HDD Enclosure we have today from Computer Geeks is a very small unit designed for a 2½" SATA notebook drive, and features two methods for connecting to a computer, either through USB 2.0 or eSATA. As an added bonus it supports powered eSATA, a new standard for supplying operating voltage for the unit over the same cable that's used for the data stream, so that a separate AC adapter is not required. The case also comes with an attractive vinyl sleeve to help protect the aluminum enclosure from scratches and dings that can occur during transportation. Join us as we take a closer look at the Geeks HE-2521B.