Review: Octigen 3.5in Enclosure hard disk enclosure

Do-it-yourself external storage

Octigen’s latest USB2 drive enclosure accepts any size of parallel-ATA (Pata) hard drive. It’s a stylish unit made of aluminium and plastic, with a handy desktop stand supplied.

Installation of the hard drive is a bit fiddly but it’s not a difficult job, although there’s no help at all in the badly written instruction sheet.

A couple of pieces of adhesive foam rubber are supplied with no indication what you’re supposed to do with them, but we presume they’re to stop the drive from rattling around inside the case when you’re travelling.

It can operate as a bus-powered device or be powered from the supplied mains adapter. The fanless design relies on the case to dissipate heat, and we found it does this pretty well with case getting warm but not hot. Overall it’s a very tidy design and the stand works very well. A USB cable and a driver CD are provided.

This is an affordable way to get yourself some handy and stylish external storage.