Make sure the drive will spin down when inactive for an amount of time. If you are keeping it plugged in and powered on the whole time this is very important.
Mine didn’t, and got very hot overnight, and I’m sure would have had a much lesser lifespan if I hadn’t worked out how to send a SATA sleep command from the OS whenever it was idle for 20 mins or more. Some drive enclosures come with firmware that does this for you, or Windows drivers which do this, so look for those ones.
In the IJK listing, for example, I can quickly find that the Coolermaster enclosure won’t spin down, but the Blue Eye S3380 probably will. You usually have to go find the manufacturer data sheet or a good review of the drive to find this out for sure.
Edit: eSATA is probably fine to do this by just Windows power management settings, but cases are reported of enclosures that simply won’t respond to a SATA sleep command. Worth making sure.
Sleeping HDDs
Make sure the drive will spin down when inactive for an amount of time. If you are keeping it plugged in and powered on the whole time this is very important.
Mine didn’t, and got very hot overnight, and I’m sure would have had a much lesser lifespan if I hadn’t worked out how to send a SATA sleep command from the OS whenever it was idle for 20 mins or more. Some drive enclosures come with firmware that does this for you, or Windows drivers which do this, so look for those ones.
In the IJK listing, for example, I can quickly find that the Coolermaster enclosure won’t spin down, but the Blue Eye S3380 probably will. You usually have to go find the manufacturer data sheet or a good review of the drive to find this out for sure.
Edit: eSATA is probably fine to do this by just Windows power management settings, but cases are reported of enclosures that simply won’t respond to a SATA sleep command. Worth making sure.