Mediasonic Smart Drive HD6-SU3-BK Black External Enclosure

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got this on sale, it has USB 3.0 which is nice.

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With the larger capacity hds becoming more common, these enclosures are priced right and come in handy for those smaller 320-500gb you may have around the house. Easy to install the hd and is all plug and play after that.

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This is my second MediaSonic Smart Drive. This new one has USB 3.0 which is great! My WD Red drive stays really cool, and I'm happy the enclosure supports 3TB drives! MediaSonic has great email support - would definitely buy again!

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Bought this mainly for my huge photos collection backup. coupled with a recent 1TB Seagate drive and have no problems at all so far.I am not able to test out the rated high speed of USB3.0 due to my old sytem. Heat arisen from this enclosure is really unnoticeable.

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Used it with a WD20EARS Green 2T drive for data archival. Comes with a short USB3 cable. Standard speeds of around 32MB with USB2. Experienced a drive disconnect when transferring 200GB of data - Maybe a fluke incident

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I'm using a WD 2TB green drive in the unit connected to an Asus U3S6 I/O card. In Attodisk, I obtain speeds of ~110/106 MB/s reading and writing respectively. Initially I had trouble getting it to work at USB3 speeds (was only getting 37MB/s = max USB2 speed). My solution was to upgrade the BIOS on my motherboard and explicitly set the PCIE Clock to exactly 100 (my system is overclocked). Also, the connectors on the USB3 cable are a little long and stick out by 3-4mm so are not as stable as my USB2 cables. The unit is ~15mm longer than my Acomdata enclosure (good for heat dissipation but not so good for portability). Also found a tiny scratch on the front end cap plastic. I would've scored the unit higher if not for the issues with getting USB3 speed working correctly and the ongoing drive detection issue.

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Plugged in a 1TB Hitachi SATA drive in this baby, four screws to hold the hard drive to the cage and two screw for the internal cage to the enclosure. You can connect or avoid the led lights, based on desire. I got about 70-80mb writing speeds based on ACTUAL transferring of 12GB of tv shows as a test. With Music files it dropped a bit to 65mb/s. Copying from RAID1 (Mirror) 1TB WD Blacks to 1TB Hitachi. Copying via a regular USB port is about 35-40mb/s, so USB3 at least doubles the performance. I'm sure newer USB3 enclosures will do better than this, but for now cant complain. Of course E-SATA is nicer, but less people have that connection. Heck, besides AMD motherboards, no one has USB3.

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Have not been able yet to use my USB 3.0 ports off my back panel with this device. The device forces my drivers to use it as a USB 2.0 instead. Always get that warning "This USB device can perform faster Super-Speed USB 3.0" or something. Not sure it is the device, drivers or?Need help

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I have combined this with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1 TB SATA Hard Drive. When tested with CrystalDiskMark, it is just a few Mb/s slower than plugging the hard drive directly to an internal SATA port. (112 Mb/s Read & 96 Mb/s Write)