External HD vs External Enclosure?

I was wondering if y'all had any opinions as to reliability differences between getting an off the shelf external HD vs buying a fan cooled enclousre then picking out a higher rated HD.

I've gone with both methods and honestly you can't go wrong with either method. Read the reviews of both the enclosures as well as the external HDD to know what other users think or have experienced. That is the most invaluable asset for me.

My only qualm with the external enclosure is if there is a power surge when turning it on, it could zap the HDD and there is nothing you can do to get it to work again. I lost a 640 GB HDD because of that. Did not do anything more than plugging it up, lost power briefly, and it did not come back. Enclosure circuits were wasted and HDD along with it. Thankfully it was a meaningless and redundant drive but then again that is a risk for all external solutions.

I would say there is very little difference between the two overall. As suggested look for reviews and get a drive with a good rap sheet, keep in mind that people are WAY more likely to come back to give a negative review than the other way around. All the manufacture external hard drives are is... HDs in an external enclosure so I would fail to see any possibility that a DIY option has a high probability of frying your HDD although if you are worried about it get a 2.5" and all the juice will come from the USB, fully regulated.

-B&C

I prefer an enclosure because you can upgrade/replace the drive to a larger size down the line. Most external drives from WD/seagate are plastic and harder to upgrade.

Either way you go, whether off the shelf or buying and enclosure and inserting your own drive -- get a model that has a cooling fan. Hard drives die from heat (as well as power surges noted above). Have a secondary source to back up your files like DVD disks, online backup, etc. Don't depend on an external drive as your only source of backup. You never know when you may have a hard drive failure.

It seems that the bigger the drives get, the less dependable they become, IMHO. 1tb SATA drives that are a year old or so old (internal and in external cases) are failing right and left and my old drives whether SATA or PATA of 500 gb or less are still going strong after 5 to 8 years.

Another thing about external drives -- use them and then unplug/eject properly and power them off. Even with a fan, they get overheated and fail too soon when left on 24/7, in my experience.

Keep in mind there are very few HD manufacturers left, and if you don't buy a WD, Hitachi (now part of WD), Seagate, or Toshiba one, then most other external HDs will have one of these brands inside, most likey a Seagate.

Everyone has given excellent advice IMHO.

Another consideration may be what ports you have on your computer. If you have an eSata port for example and would like to take advantage of it's speed, most external HDs do not have that port unless you start looking at the higher end ones, but an enclosure like the Antec MX1 has both usb 2.0 and eSata ports so you could use it either way. OFC if your PC has usb 3.0 then most of the external HDs out there currently have 3.0 ports and although I haven't checked I'm sure the newer enclosures probably have 3.0 too.

Precautions I personally take with all the HDs (I have 3.5 inch external HD, 2.5 inch external HD, and a 3.5 enclosure HD):
1. Plug the HDs into same UPS battery backup I use for my PC to protect against surges and against abrupt power outages.
2. If drive is horizontal I elevate it with coasters or other items so that air circulates underneath as well and then I aim a portable desk fan directly at the drive (most external HDs do not come with a cooling fan inside). This is most important when doing gigantic file transfers/backups like 1 TB in a day. This all helps with the overheating.
3. While doing the large transfers/backups, avoid bumping, disturbing the drive.

I've recently started using FBackup to copy my files over to the drives. Instead of running one backup job in that software to copy huge amounts like 1 to 1.5 TB at once, I break it up into multiple jobs and try to stay under 250 GB per job, letting the drive rest between jobs to avoid overheating. If you use the mirror option in that software, then once you have a backup of your data, the next time you run the same jobs, the backup will go extremely fast (and I don't use a fan then) since it will only update your backup with the files that have changed. This is less stressful on a drive than doing manual backups of 1 to 2 TB every few weeks all at once.

The only external HD I've had fail on me so far was a Seagate silver 1.5 TB freeagent desk but that particular model seemed to have a 40 percent click of death failure rate and there was an attempted class action lawsuit against Seagate for that drive as well as cries for recall. However the 750GB one I've had so far has not had any issues. I try and stay away from the fancier versions of HD lines, sticking to the basics like WD Elements just because some external HDs have strange partitions on them and/or software that is difficult to remove.

Both work, it just comes down to whatever you can get a good deal on. You're in the right place for that