External Hard Drive Enclosures

I needed to buy additional hard drive storage for my images.

Instead of traditional external hard drives, I bought two metal external hard drive cases with a built in fan and two large 3.5 inch NAS drives. I installed each drive in a separate enclosure (very easy to do) and formatted them using windows 10 Pro--Disk Management . I will copy all of my image files to both drives this weekend. For just image storage, this may be overkill as heat build up should be minimal and a traditional external drive might work just fine as long as it is not "on" all the time.

If you are going to be using an external drive as part of your normal image processing, the external case with its fan will get rid of the heat so much better than a traditional external drive. Some are using laptops as their main processor with external hard drives and in this case having an external drive properly cooled is a real need IMO.

The external hard drive cases I got are made by Rosewill, model RX-358 USC, 3.5 inch SATA to USB 3.0 & eSATA. You can fit any 3.5 inch drive into it. The 8 TB limitation sometimes found in documentation is somewhat misleading. I installed a 14 TB drive in one and a 12 TB drive in the other.

If I can do this, anybody can as I am not very techy. Think about this as an option as you plan your next computer upgrade or new system.

I don't see anything wrong with your choice. Fan cooling is essential for long-term use, even for single drive enclosures. USB-3 will give you about 150 MB/sec speed.

I use an Oyen 5-bay drive Thunderbolt/USB-3 case, which can be configured as a conventional drives or as a RAID. The drives do not need to be mounted. They slide into racks and are held in place by a latched (lockable) door. I usually have five 3.5" drives running, which stay cool with a built-in fan. I like the removeable feature for use as a large working memory for audio/video projects. When one drive fills up, I replace it and keep the old drive as an archive.

I use Drobo drives for relatively permanent storage, a 5-bay Thunderbolt drive and a 5-Bay NAS. Drobo drives are expensive, but offer redundant storage withwithout typical RAID management. I can replace a bad drive without powering down. No data is lost, and the new drive integrates in about one day. The Drobo is usable through the rebuilding process.

NAS drives are only about 1/2 as fast as a TB or USB-3 drive, and are slow to wake up from a dormant state. You can reach them from anyplace via the internet (and so can hackers if you let your guard down). The Drobo NAS can operate with two bonded ethernet channels, which brings their speed nearly up to direct connect status (300+ MB/sec).

eSATA is a fast interface, but limited to stiff cables about 3' in length.You can boot a PC from an eSATA drive. A Mac will boot from practically any interface.

If you have a lot of image files, you need data transfer software. Copy and paste will only work on a handfull of files at a time, then crash. You will be up all night, and then some.

I have a USB 3.0 dock that you simply plug a drive into. The lack of enclosure keeps the drive cool in use.

Rarely have I unplugged a drive to find it more than comfortably warm to the touch.

Also, I believe that many HDDs have a built-in temperature sensor nowadays that can be software interrogated at intervals and monitored. Raising an alarm if necessary.