Rosewill RX81-MP-SC
The RX81-MP-SC is a hot-swappable external hard drive enclosure made of heat-dissipating aluminum. Designed to reside in an office rather than a laptop case, the RX81-MP-SC is somewhat bulky (13.5 x 22.5 x 3.5cm [HxWxD]) and requires a separate power adapter. This probably isn’t an enclosure you’ll be toting around.
The device supports hard drives up to 1TB, although you’ll have to purchase a hard drive separately. Installing a drive in the RX81-MP-SC was somewhat time-consuming. You had to remove two screws to get the outside case apart, four to get in to the enclosure, and then another four to secure the hard drive to the case for the installation. However, the hard drive itself popped right in without any fuss. Once the whole thing back together, the unit worked immediately.
There was no software to install; the plug-and-play feature worked smoothly. The Seagate drive used for test was NTFS, but the enclosure also supports Mac OS 8.6 and above, as well as Linux 2.4.1.0 and above, so you can format a drive to use the RX81-MP-SC with just about any system. The variety of ports adds to the RX81-MP-SC’s format friendliness. You can connect the enclosure to a computer or network hub via five different interfaces from USB 1.1 to eSATA, so the device will work with computers young and old.