SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Aluminum 5.25"/3.5" Enclosure, for SATA HDD/Optical Drives (Black)

At the time I purchased this enclosure it was the cheapest one available that promised what I wanted: 1) It could house an internal Blu-Ray optical drive; and 2) it could guarantee USB 3.0 speeds for the through-put. That's exactly what I got. Took less than 15 minutes to install.

I bought it since it is only one USB 3 enclosure on the market (at least at time of sale). I got new motherboard for my desktop with USB 3, so I desperately wanted at least one USB 3 device connected to it. It was really stupid , since USB 3 doesn't give any speed advantages to Optical Drives (including BlueRay Writers). I put LG BD writer drive in this enclosure and I really don't like how it works on my Windows 8 Pro (x64). It is dead slow when initially reading content of the disks (DVD or BD). Well I can't blame it entirely on enclosure it might be combination of Windows 8, USB 3 driver and enclosure glitches. What is really bad about this enclosure is (as it called in description) "built in super-fan". I was expecting this fan to be smart enough to control the speed based on temperature of enclosure, instead it goes "full" speed from beginning and create enormous noise. It is so annoying so I just switch it BD drive off when not in use (hopefully enclosure has a switch). Once I will open it up and cut the fan (common who needs a dedicated fan for BD drive?). I wouldn't recommend this item, if you need an enclosure for Optical drive just buy USB 2 one without any fans. Beware of this!

Received the item.it is well built with an all aluminum body and as other have mentioned one of the only USB 3 5.25 enclosures. Upon connecting it to my new Sager laptop via USB 3 and testing it with an SSD drive in the unit as soon as i try to copy a file over to test speed, the unit drops out of windows and then re-appears thus causing the file transfer to stop. I then test again and i am able to copy a file over, however speeds are aweful from low 2-3Mb/s to 14-19Mb/s SSD to SSD from my laptop. I then did an HDTune speed test and while it did finish with out an error, speed were on Avg 152MB/s which is good, solid, of course no where near USB3 speed even taking out overhead. Going to be testing more with other cables, other drives and finally my BR drive i bought this unit to hold as well as 3 other new computers i have here with USB 3 i can test on.

If you need a case for a standard DVD burner or a standard hard drive, this may be useful to you. It works great as is out of the box.

Just what I need for an external blue-ray drive.

My initial impression was that it is well designed and pretty simple process to install an optical drive. The front panel has a removable insert for using optical drives. It has an internal mounting plate for hard drives that has to be removed before installing the optical drive and the same screws that hold the plate will mount the optical drive. However, after a few months, it quit working. At first I thought it was the optical drive that had quit so I installed a known-good one and that didn't work either. The one I took out worked fine in my computer. The symptom is that the PC sees that I have plugged in a USB cable but no drive shows up.