Editorial Review:Product Description:DataStor is an industry-leading provider of low-cost, high quality mass storage upgrade accessories. DataStor offers a complete line of external enclosures, internal upgrade kits for Apple and PC computers, and external drive interface kits.Whether you need to mount a 3.5' drive in a 5.25' bay, a 2.5' drive in a 3.5' bay, or you just want some added cooling capability for your hard drive, DataStor has a mounting solution that will fit your needs.
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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
-
Does the job pretty well
Reasons for using little 2.5in drives in a desktop PC vary, of course, and most people probably just want to recycle a surplus laptop drive - in which case they will perhaps be less concerned about the robustness of their drive's mounting than I am. But in my case, a 2.5in, 120GB Seagate drive was selected new, specifically for constructing a very small, very low power, very quiet Linux-based instrumentation computer, based on the industrial AMD Geode processor (which has similar low power requirements and makes very little heat or noise.) A great deal of thought went into every detail of its case...
There are many adapter kits for putting 2.5in "notebook" hard disks into regular desktop PCs. The poorest are simple two-piece rails which attach to the sides of the smaller drive and widen it to fit a regular 3.5in drive bay, combined with a cobbled together power and signal cable adapter that hangs off the small drive's rear interface. To my mind, most of these look like they'd stress the little drive's case and attach points with any rough handling, and the worst designs have really vulnerable soldered wire pigtails hanging from them... Not acceptable.
This adapter design uses a one piece 3.5in wide metal bracket - which takes any stresses which otherwise would go through the 2.5in drive's case - and it provides an attached power and cable adapter module which also stays fixed to the bracket and gives some protection to the drive when fumble fingers are plugging and unplugging the cables during an installation. Nice.
I would have given it five stars if the whole thing had some vibration dampening built in, but it doesn't and the engineers who designed it were probably right - most people won't need THAT much protection, and wouldn't want to pay more for it. There are, however, even better designed adapter brackets available in Taiwan and in Europe - I just haven't seen them for sale in the USA.