Hi.
I have a Western Digital WD60EFRX HDD that I would like to put into an enclosure for external use.
It had been in an Synology 1515+.
Can anyone give me some direction on what case to buy?
Thanks for the help.
That’s a simple 5400 rpm SATA HDD with low throughput so all you need is any run of the mill SATA-USB bridge. Since this is a 3.5" HDD you need that bridge to be powered though.
There’s essentially three routes I can think of. Simple cable adapter, most commonly for sporadic use (offers no protection). Dock, most commonly used by people who want to use various disks interchangeably (offers only partial protection). And finally, simple case, most commonly for continued use (fully enlcoses and protects the disk).
Below are suitable and inexpensive examples for each. Depending on which Mac you have, you’ll want to connect through USB-C so I’ve also added two simple A-C dongle examples (plug vs. cable type). There are of course some of these that come right with a USB-C cable, a simple Amazon search will reveal all that. The dock comes with both cable types.
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I have been happy using Vantec NexStar HX enclosures. The fan will keep it running cool, even when under a heavy load.
This is a USB 3.0 enclosure. It’s top speed is 5 Gbit/s, which (according to your drive’s data sheet is more than enough to keep up with the drive’s 175 MB/s (1.4 Gbit/s) internal data-transfer rate.
You should, however, take note of the following:
- The WD Red series is rated for 24x7 operation (good), but the 6TB size uses SMR recording technology and the drive spins at 5400 RPM, so this is not a high performance drive. But you probably knew that already.
- You will almost certainly have to re-partition and re-format the drive, since you’re removing it from a NAS enclosure. Disk Utility should be able to do this with no problems, but you will lose any data already on the drive. So make a backup before you begin, if you need to preserve anything on the drive.
- If the drive is a few years old, you may want to replace it anyway.
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David, how loud is the fan noise?
It’s pretty quiet. I can hear it if I lean in to take a listen, but I don’t normally hear a thing.
But keep in mind that it’s behind the monitor on my desk, and I’ve got other much louder fans in the room (e.g. the one in my Ethernet switch and the one in my PC tower).
I have two dual NexStar caddys, the first I bought 2012. They are great in that you can insert both 3.5 and 2.5" drives. My are mostly used with 2TB disks for TimeMachine.
More information can be found at
What is interesting, I did not even know they had internal fans! So yes they are very quiet and they are in the open. And my hearing is fine!
I have a WD Blue drive running Time Machine in a Vantec NexStar enclosure. The fan is relatively quiet but I keep it switched off and the enclosure isn’t even warm.
We’ve gone through a couple hundred enclosures, and the only ones that last for us are the OWC Mercury Elite series. My favorites have external bricks, thus low heat, passive cooling, and work fine even with 10K RPM drives. Look for open box returns to save a few bucks. When we stopped buying cheap enclosures, our drive failure rate also went down, but that’s purely anecdotal, though not an likely outcome if a cheap controller drops power sporadically or delivers it dirty. Avoid anything with a touch-sensitive or single-touch (“smart”) power switch; they fail; solid rocker switches for me, please.
Thanks for the advice.
I’ve been using OWC enclosures for ages too, and though I’ve had two or three fail over the years out of maybe 60, that’s still a great track record. I also love their dual sata dock. It’s expensive, but having control over power to each slot separately is wonderful.
OWC will sell their enclosures with drives already installed, for both HDs and SSDs, so if someone really doesn’t want to fasten a cable and eight screws, that’s an option, though an expensive one.
As for SSD as backup drives–kind of ok, but be sure to have redundant backups on several different drives. One of the really nice things about spinning hard drives is that they almost always fail slowly with warning signs, such as everything slowing down. This gives you a good chance to rescue your data. When SSDs fail, they tend to just suddenly drop dead and often an OS can’t even detect their existence. DriveSavers or equivalent might be able to do something with it, but it will cost far far more than having had enough redundancy to begin with. (You know it’s expensive when they don’t say what it could cost but talk about payment plans…)