Inateck FE2005 USB 3.0 Tool-Less 2.5″ HDD Enclosure Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The Inateck FE2005 Tool Less Enclosure is a real bargain and can be yours for just £14.77 on Amazon. If you’re located in the US you can pick it up for $17.99 at Amazon while German readers can get it for €17.99, also on Amazon. I call this a bargain because £15 isn’t much for a device that offers what this one does.

SSD are becoming cheaper and cheaper all the time and since USB can’t deliver the same speeds as SATA3 can, you don’t need to get the best drive on the market. SSDs with 512GB capacity and speeds of 350MB/s and up can be had for around £150 these days, so you can create a cheap and fast portable solution in combination with this Inateck FE2005 Enclosure for less than £170.

Overview

The overall build-quality is great on the Inateck FE2005 enclosure even though the majority of it is made out of plastics. But there is also a thin aluminium plate at the top to help with the heat-dissipation. The choice of materials in return help to keep the weight down and that is an increased bonus for a portable enclosure.

Every corner is well made and everything has a tight and good fit, it is clear that Inateck put thoughts into the design. This is again reflected when looking inside the drive with padding on both sides to protect the drive from scratches and to catch vibrations from mechanical drives. The included foam-pad is another added bonus if you ever need to remove the one already added located inside the drive. It’s a minor thing that cost next to nothing, but adds a huge convenience for the customer.

There aren’t many things to consider when using this enclosure. You gently slide it apart and open the clamshell, insert your drive and close it up again. The tool-less design makes it both easy and fast to switch drives, but remember to eject or unmount the drive first so you prevent any unnecessary data corruption.

The Inateck FE2005 2.5″ HDD Enclosure did very well under our tests and showed UASP transfer speeds up to 460MB/s when reading. Our write tests showed us sequential transfer speeds that were equal to baseline SATA connection and only suffered 1MB/s from the conversion. Incompressible data and access times suffer a bit from the USB connection, but that isn’t the enclosures fault. The results were all within the expected area of what the USB bus can handle.

Pros:

• Tool-less design
• Portable weight and size
• UASP transfer speeds
• Good price

Neutral:

• Doubling the connectivity with an eSATA connector would be a nice feature on one hand, but it would also increase the costs.

“Inateck put a lot of thought into a simple device. The FE2005 Tool-less HDD enclosure would be great to take advantage of old un-used drives as well as creating a cost effective portable storage solution with a brand new high-capacity SSD.”

Thanks to Inateck for providing this review sample