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With the arrival and installation of Leopard and Time Machine on my PowerBook G4, it was just a matter of time that I would be needing an external hard drive enclosure. I know that nowadays its probably more economical to buy an off-the-shelf product, but I had a spare 500 GB hard drive on hand and figured that now was a good time to use it as ever.

So, I set out to do some research online and the pickings were a little slim. I guess that since a lot of the manufacturers already make their own enclosures, the market for "roll your own" enclosure has shrunken a lot in the past years. A few years ago, I recall the enclosures were easy to find and now, its really hard to get your hands on a reliable one. In any case, in the past, I've always known that Other World Computing or OWC has pretty good products, so I decided to visit their site. The one that seemed to fit my budget and specifications was the MiniStack v2, they also produce a MiniStack v3, but it was more expensive and included features such as eSATA that I didn't need. Also, as a side note, normally I like enclosures that are vertical, but the MiniStack sits horizontally, I decided to make this an exception.

As far as the specifications, this enclosure could accommodate ATA drives up to 750 GB and it had 2 Firewire (1394) ports and 3 USB ports. It also apparently had an "intelligent" fan and seemed to get pretty good reviews online. Newer provided all the screws that were needed and also a short USB and Firewire cable.

Also included in the box were: the power adapter, the manual, the enclosure cover and some tape (for taping down the hard drive's heat sensor). The instructions were straightforward and there were lots of pictures illustrating how to assemble the enclosure. I think total assembly time was approximately 30 min. or so. The only problem that I had was that the enclosure cover was made of plastic and didn't fit well, mostly because it was such a tight fit.

Anyway, I've been using this enclosure for about a week and I can say so far that I don't have any issues with it. It works flawlessly for what I wanted it to do and I find that the on/off switch to be a good feature. That being said, I really like this enclosure and would recommend it to anyone who has a spare HD lying around and are looking for an external enclosure, however, if you are in the market for an external drive, the more economical solution would be to buy an external drive/enclosure ready made.