What exactly is a hard drive enclosure
A hard drive enclosure is something very useful to have around. Quite typically these will allow you to quickly connect your hard drive to your PC without having to embark on the long journey of actually disassembling your computer. By far the most popular hard drive enclosure is the mobile rack. This device has been in use for quite some time, usually for servers. They are extremely useful in some conditions. Servers usually use hard drive mobile racks for backing up purposes. The mobile racks themselves are pretty simple in construction; they a permanent connection with the IDE cable or SCSI on the outside, have a handle by which they can be extracted from their slot and on the inside they provide the necessary cables to hook up your average hard disk. Their very simplicity made them so popular. Given the fact that all mobile racks are in compliance with standards and they fit just about any case also helped in making them popular. For some unknown reason though mobile racks never quite became popular with the general public. Probably the reason stands in the fact that most of the common users don't like moving their hard drives to much and tend to leave it where it belongs… inside the case. Typically an average user will use other, more cheap methods for backing up or ignore backup altogether. On the other hand those hardcore users who use to carry data between computers with their hard drives also don't seem to mind playing with their hardware. Mobile racks became the emblem of the true professionals, who could very easily hook the hard drive in an internal slot, but simply don't have the necessary time to waste. Most people tend to see mobile racks as useless. If you are going to move your hard drive once every month, the mobile rack will soon start to appear as some thrown away money. On the other hand when you have to daily make a backup on a hard drive, the mobile rack will look like a gift from heaven and one of the wisest investments possible. The problem with a hard drive enclosure such as a mobile rack also resides in the fact that they broke rather often. The computer industry simply doesn't have the expertise to create an item which can resist the mechanical stress that a human will most likely apply to such a piece of equipment. So mobile racks are one of those things that break often, but at least they are cheap. With the external hard drive enclosure the situation is quite different, but this is a story that the next chapter will explain.
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