nGear 2.5″ USB Hard Drive Enclosure

Posted on March 23, 2007
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nGear enclosure I like it when a piece of gear comes along that I never knew I needed until I really needed it, and then somehow it becomes indispensable.

My favourite new piece of hardware is the nGear USB Hard Drive Enclosure I picked up the other day at NCIX for $20. This thing is simply an enclosure for a 2.5″ laptop hard drive that connects and mounts to the host computer via USB.

A couple days ago I was trying to get a start on my taxes and realized my 2004 tax return was on my old laptop’s drive, which has been sitting in a box in the closet for the better part of a year. I powered up the laptop and… nothing. I took the drive out of that laptop (easy) and swapped it into my current laptop (hard) and… nothing.

I picked up the nGear enclosure, put the drive into it and… damn, the fabled Toshiba click of death. That’s a bad sign, it means the drive is either already dead or in critical condition.

So I whacked the drive on the edge my desk a couple times the way my friend Ryan once taught me, plugged it back in and ta-da - green light but no mount.

The nGear enclosure comes with a bizarro three-USB connector cable and really, really poor documentation. Great packaging but the docs practically scream “if you don’t know, you’re not worthy of knowing” It took me a couple minutes to figure out that the two-sided end of the cable has to go into both USB ports on my laptop in order to get enough power to adequately run the drive. That mounted the drive, I copied off all the data and the day was saved.

nGear for Safety

The nGear enclosure is now slated to become an integral part of my laptop travel back-up procedure. By teaming it up with SuperDuper and putting in a drive the same size (or larger) as the one in my laptop I can travel with a mirror drive that’s cloned exactly the same as the one I use daily. Should the laptop drive fail I can swap in the one in the enclosure. Should the laptop get damaged or stolen I can use the one in the enclosure in a new machien (obviously pack them in seperate bags ;)).

For $20 plus the price of a drive this thing is pretty darned handy. I recommend if you’ve got a laptop.

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