A D S USB 2.0 Drive Kit (USBX-804) Storage Cabinet

Pros: Convert any drive/CD/DVD etc to external; Drives may not burn up in CPU
Cons: Fan useless; Questionable Rectifier; No front power button; Can't daisy chain

Having 7-120GB harddrives between two computers I was starting to run into problems with failing drives. Perhaps related to the fact they are all Maxtor - perhaps related to the heat generated by those suckers. The external USB drives are expensive - ...

Pros: Works, Compact, Quiet
Cons: Price is in the middle of the field, but perhaps justified

This device required minimal steps to get working. I had an extra 30 gig drive, so I opened the box, plugged in the IDE cable and the power cable, plugged in power supply and the USB 2 cable. I hear the windows sound indicating a new device has been detected, and what do you know it says a new drive detected. I click over H: (which is the new drive), and I start seeing all the files I had previously stored on this 30 gig drive. Transfer rates are limited only by the speed of your drives, so in my case I was getting 20-40 gigs a second, just about maximum allowed by USB. This was even faster than between my two internal drives, probably because they had to share the same bus (or one was slower).

Pros: The product works for use as a portable hard drive.
Cons: The fan is lousy, could have used a better one for the price it cost.

Overview:
I actually helped a business setup an ADS USB 2.0 and Firewire enclosure. It worked okay, but looking at other enclosure they seem to have similar guts. I can't complain about performance, or other issues.

What I used:
I installed a Western digital 120 gb 8mb cache inside, with relative ease. I set this up around 5 months ago, and the unit has been running constantly for weekly backups.

Cons:
The only problem is the fan is going bad. It is constantly loud, and most likely going bad. I am planning on replacing the fan to a ball bearing or some other solution. This enclosure wasn't cheap, so to provide a better fan would have been better.

Recommendation:
For casual or home usage, this product would be okay. Not for business use for constant backups.

Pros: Quick setup, visually appealing design.
Cons: Inadequate shock-absorption.

I have the USBX-804 (USB 2.0) drive enclosure from ADS. It worked great for approximately 6 months. Out of the blue, my hard drive started making noise, and within another day it was dead. I didn't expect that it was the ADS enclosure that caused this, hard drives die all of the time for various reasons. However, I purchased a much better replacement hard drive, and positioned it in the ADS enclosure on a separate table away from anything that might jostle it. Within 1 month, the same issue occurred with the new hard drive and it completely died. My guess is that there was some internal vibrations occurring in the enclosure that were not being absorbed properly. I could be wrong about this, but for 2 hard drives to fail that quickly seems like more than just a coincidence. I hope that ADS has included shock-absorption in their newer models.

Pros: Great
Cons: N/A

It does everything the box said it would do. I put a 120GB 7200 RPM DiamondMax Plus 9 in it. Works just great with all the programs and games that are on it. Runs great with USB 2.0. I didn't buy it just to back-up my file I bought it because I didn't want to take my computer apart just to put the the hard drive in.