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Best brand usb 3.0 external box with sata connector for 2.5" drives, please recommand them for me.

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First post, by pentiumspeed

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Quick, reliable and can check on internal details like SMART not the ones that hides the drive behind chipset means I cannot use gsmartcontrol to read out the SMART attributes, I have seen this often but I need one that works with this utility. Reason for this, I have to use gsmartcontrol to diagnose hard drive issues for consoles. This is most important when I have to do this as all Xbox One (original, S and X) outputs no video if hard drive is corrupted or dying. Also no video output can happen on Xbox one S and X if their HDMI retimer IC is defective, hence need to confirm that hard drive is healthy or dying via SMART read out.

I also need to buy one or two so I can make custom external SSD boxes since USB 3.0 sticks had terrible write speeds. Takes 20 minutes to write a 6GB OSU1 folder of files to generic USB stick which I have to do nearly monthly due to microsoft version releases for the xbox one (original, S and X) stuff when I'm replacing their dying hard drives. Really annoying.

Thanks,

Cheers,

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 1 of 4, by BitWrangler

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I just grab what's cheap at factory direct or somewhere. I don't give a damn about SMART though, never been any use to me, got drives that SMART has been saying will die since 15 years ago, still apparently doing fine... had drives (All came in used, never had a bought new drive go on me touch wood) that have just died with absolutely no warning from SMART and some even got "looked at" more closely when I set them up and had like 80% plus life on everything and still barfed. .... Then you try a SMART util that is supposed to be super sensitive and able to do crystal ball deep analysis and it won't damn well shut up about power on hours... screw you, they don't mean crap, power on means steady temp, no cycling, and I ain't reading or writing hard, so ignore it... "BLEEP BLEEP Power on hours real high !!!!!" shut up you stupid thing and tell me something that matters.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 2 of 4, by RetroGamer4Ever

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Most of the USB enclosures I've tried have no SMART support in the supplied drivers or utilities, unless you can find a third-party driver build for the storage chipset that has it enabled.

Reply 3 of 4, by pentiumspeed

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No no. I have a disassembled USB 3.0 to SATA adapter for checking storage drives pulled from consoles under repair by reading the SMART using gsmartcontrol. Faster this way to diagnose and this saved time. Surface scanning do nothing but waste time which is time-critical at work.

Real reason is I wanted to get more external boxes so I can have at least 2 external SSD drives as USB stick storage units with better write performance.

Please stick to the topic on recommendations
of good external storage boxes.

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 4 of 4, by jmarsh

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You'd have to get a pretty cheap USB2SATA adapter to not have support for SMART... Reason being the USB storage protocol has an ATA passthrough command that lets the host issue any command it likes and the adapter just passes it straight through to the attached drive. I've used it before to perform digital audio extraction from a SATA CD drive connected over USB when the usb adapter wouldn't recognize certain SCSI commands.

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