Bought this unit today, set it up, and it did not work. Plugged the drive into my SATA to USB adapter and confirmed the drive was good.
Cheap framework, stay away from this brand.
I bought the vantec 3.5" enclosure with firewire 800 and it would overheat using my 7200 RPM Western Digital 1TB hard Sata hard Drive. IT would work for a transfer or two and then vanish from the computer. the SATA connector would get very hot, so it must be overheating. Then I exchanged it for a different case. the only other one they had was without FW800. Same thing... Both Vantec cases overheated constantly. It wasnt till they gave me a Velocity enclosure with just USB that it worked perfect
* Easy to install.
* Firewire 400 provides excellent transfer speeds compared to usb 2.0.
* Aesthetically pleasing.
* Good for mobility or all in one computers.
* Built in power brick!
Weaknesses:
* $20 more for firewire 400?
* Gets quite hot if used extensively....stand upright.
* No power management features if computer is shut down.
* Firewire 800 for the Mac crowd?
Summary:
All in all an excellent means of putting residual SATA drives to good use. As a Mac user needing to use Windows now and again, the Vantec external makes for a good external system drive... firewire makes for almost near internal HDD performance. This drive does get hot...please stand upright! Also, paying $20 dollars more for firewire is a little questionable; where is the firewire 800?