Look at what we have here! NewEgg is just sending me all… Okay, they didn't send me anything, I had to purchase it. But it was for you, the viewers. Do we have those? Anyways. I needed an external hard drive and an enclosure. Lets open this baby up!
I picked up a Rosewill R2-JBOD Aluminum 3.5" USB 2.0 DUAL-BAY External Enclosure and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3500410AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s hard drive. The other hard drive is a 160 gig Seagate I picked up, but I am returning it, I decided to do something different, stay tuned!
This enclosure came packaged very well, and you can see all the goodies in here, and a close up of the brick. This device really amazed me in the fact that it came with a USB cord. Now why can't printers come with a cord? I unwrapped it all and quickly went to work.
Four screws take this sleek looking box apart; they came out easily without much effort. Considering I did not feel like getting the proper sized Phillips, I used a flat head screw driver that fit.
With the screws out, the carriage easily slid out from the enclosure, which might I add is very sturdy by itself. The tolerances between the carriage and the enclosure were very good. Not sloppy, so no worries about the hard drive banging around in there if you take it traveling.
I grabbed the hard drive, plus four screws that came with the pack and installed the drive. It slid into place very easily, no brains involved. I really liked that. We have other things to think about other than the complexity of putting a drive in a carrier.
Before I got to carried away, I grabbed the tape and the bag with the left over five screws. Yes. I said five, count them. I guess they wanted some redundancy just in case. I taped them to the carrier so they would always be available if I was to put in a second drive. Now, lets find some space for this guy.
How about right here. Lets just clear all this crap out of the way first.
Oh, that looks great there! I needed to throw those plates away from breakfast anyway, so it was a good excuse. That black matches my old brick, I mean, laptop very well.
You can see when you power it up, a green light turns on. I plugged it into the computer and formatted the drive using disk management, then created a new partition. A blue status light flashes when there is some sort of activity. Heavy activity will make it light up brighter.
I lost 5 screws out of 5 on this enclosure. It was easy to set up, simple to work with and was made very well. Rosewill does it again.
William,
Thanks for your pictorial description of your Rosewill R2-JBOD.
The pictures and descriptions were excellent and I really appreciate your input.
Thank you MsUnique98!
I am still enjoying my R2-JBOD enclosure at home. Well, when I am home..
Is this still working well? I'm thinking of picking one up.
The JBOD Enclosure is working great still. I have 2 hard drives in it now. One is not mine, but they still have not called me back to pick it up.
I had to get some data off it for them, and I repaired the hard drive. Took me a few minutes to remember how to get the case apart again, but once I figured that out, it was quick getting the second hard drive in and it back up and running.
It travels very well too seeing as the case is aluminum, instead of just junk plastic. It's a bit big for my briefcase, but I make it work.
I would still recommend it as an Enclosure for anyone.
It's also really good about if its plugged in or not, you can power the unit on, and it wont spin up the hard drives till it detects USB connection.
I just purchased this and it does spin up the disks when it's not connected. Any insight? Thanks.
I should have been more specific with that info on the spinning up.
When you plug a hard drive in to power, the platters spin up, but not at full power. Nor does the hard drive seek or perform any of its other functions. When you then plug the USB in, the hard drives power on full and start to operate.
So yes, they spin up when power is applied, but not an operational spin up. I hope this is making sense.
Can this device support two different types of hard drives? For example, a tb and a 500gig? Do they show up as separate drives on your computer? Thanks for the help. This device seems so cool just want to make sure its solid. Also, does it stay cool? Wouldn't want the hard drives overheating, you know? Thanks! :)
Yes, the drives will show up separate. I have a 500 gig in mine and a 300 I believe is the other one. A customers drive that they never came and picked up.
As for getting hot, I have yet to have it get to hot, the fan in the back works great. There are controls on that as well if I remember correctly to set it on auto or always on.... (I think.... haha)
It's a really solid device, the case is nice, and stays nice. It's traveled around the east coast with me and it still looks brand new.
Unless you link the drives together, they will show up separately.
Do the drives have to be reformated? And do the drives have to be SATA?
I installed a customers into mine, and did not have to reformat the drive.
I might have had to mount it in windows, but that was a while ago as well, so I'm not 100% sure on that.
As for SATA only, I do not recall. You should be able to tell from the pictures or neweggs description of the device in their statistics.