5 Hard Drive Enclosures and Adapters Reviewed

Tom's Hardware Guide Mobile Devices: Plug and Save: 15 Hard Drive Enclosures and Adapters Reviewed - Requiem For Floppy Disk, CD And DVD Storage

This looks like a pretty comprehensive review of external enclosures and USB to IDE connectors.

This review compares firewire, USB 2.0 and Serial ATA support along with benchmarks for %CPU overhead and read/write throughput compared to native (SATA) devices.

Bottom line - Lindy's ME-720U2SI enclosure blew away the other enclosures and they found a Hi-Speed adapter from ARP as a quick fix for connecting IDE devices to a USB port (no power supply, but at <$15, its a no-brainer).

I have used two different USB 2.0 external cases and highly recommend this solution for home/SOHO backups in conjunction with Acronis True Image 8.0 software. Actonis supports bare metal restores, Linux based boot CD creation as well as incremental backups that other vendors don't support.