Thermaltake Silver River 5G ST0025U Aluminum 3.5" Black USB 3.0 External Enclosure

Pros: Fairly easy to install the Hard Drive. Very fast, when it's working.

Cons: Doesn't stay connected to the computer. Probably has something to do with the USB controller, but the drive becomes un-usable by the host after an idle period. The OS can still see the controller/drive, but all read/writes fail.

Other Thoughts: Running Mac OS X 10.8 on MacMini. Maybe this thing works better on Win, but it doesn't work for me. I know some people will think I'm an idiot and that it's the Mac or the drive, but I swapped the drive into another enclosure and the problems went away. It's definitely the Thermaltake enclosure that's the problem.

Pros: Sleek and very easy to put together fast works well with s 3 tb hdd (the reason why i bought it)

Cons: The screws that came with it where fine tread and the drive wasnt.

Other Thoughts: well it was nice i had the bad luck to have dropped the drive and it failed after word it would show up and the disconnect so i lost my data since once to install a hdd it has to be formated for some reason so when i installed the hdd into desktop i had to reformat it again so thats was fun this was my fault ID10T error

Pros: It works. I like the power switch, and the white indicator strip light on the front.

Cons: Including the wrong sized screws is inexcusable. They are far too large to fit into the sides of the hard drive. I had to use duct tape to hold the drive in the enclosure because all of my extra hard drive screws were too tall to fit into the enclosure without seriously damaging the metal sides.

Other Thoughts: Much too expensive for them to mess up the screw sizes. I expected something with more quality for the price.

Pros: No issues at all with this enclosure. Prior reviews said the wrong screws were enclosed. I guess they fixed that as none were enclosed with mine! Just pulled some out of my parts box and drive installed fine. I needed an enclosure to hold a 2.5TB (2500GB) WD drive & most stop at 2TB. Once connected, Win7 installed the appropriate drivers and drive was visible in Computer Management. Set it up as a GPT drive so it would recognize the entire drive. MBR drives max out at 2TB so it showed it as 2 drives (Primary & Secondary partitions). Vista & higher can recognize GPT drive formats up to 9TB I believe.

Cons: None so far.

Other Thoughts: It's been running for 3 hours and housing is still cool to the touch. I have several enclosures for backup drives and find Thermaltake & Vantec to be the best. Comes with free cheapie screwdriver! Hey, it's free... and works.

Pros: Fast, easy to setup and use.

Cons: After my new Late 2012 27" iMac sleeps, this drive does not come back online. I have another USB 3.0 device and it works fine, but not this Thermaltake.

Pros: It's a well-built case, assembly is easy and it functions as it should right out of the box. And a lot of external cases don't do that; just read the reviews. But... one would expect as much at this price. Pricing is just a few bucks shy of name brand external drives that include the hard drive.

Cons: Come on Thermaltake, put the right screws in the box. It's not that hard. Just like a lot of the other reviews of this case have noted, this case comes with fine-thread screws that if used will strip the threads on your 3 1/2 inch drive.

As a computer technician I have hundreds of spare screws so it wasn't a big problem, but be aware that the standard sized head, coarse thread screws for 3 1/2 inch drives you have lying around will not work. The heads are too large and will not slide all the way into the case. You have to find coarse threaded screws with a very flat head to slide the drive into the case, and this may be a problem for the casual computer user.

This is a premium priced box and there simply is no excuse for this kind of oversight. And we all know the manufacturers read these reviews and Thermaltake has made a financial decision to keep shipping these boxes with incorrect parts and let the end user fix their mistake.

Other Thoughts: Newegg's free shipping, a combination of FedEx handing off to USPS, took over a week for delivery.

Pros: Aluminum body radiates any heat efficiently so no need for fan.

Off switch.

USB 3.0

comes with screwdriver

Cons: wrong screws in package. if you try to use the screws that come with it to screw in the hard drive, you will strip the threads on the drive.

Other Thoughts: Other than having the wrong screws this is an excellent value.

Pros: Works as described. This storage unit has the appropriate SATA III controller chip to allow hard drives greater than 2TB to be formatted and used to their fullest capacity. I am using the enclosure with a Seagate 3TB sata III 64MB cache hard drive connected to a QNAP TS-212 via USB 2.0 The external enclosure was immediately recognized by the QNAP and the drive formatted to EXT4 to match my internal RAID 1 drives. I then set up the backup jobs to run and they are completing with no problems.

Cons: The frame that holds the drive is rather bendable plastic and the screws to mount the drive are the wrong threads and are not compatible with a standard 3.5" hard drive, so find some from around the house or go buy some at local hardware store, but do not force these into your drive.

Other Thoughts: External enclosure is aluminum, on/off switch and decent length on the usb cable and power supply cable.

Ability to use any size drive is a big plus.

Pros: All aluminum SATA 3, USB 3 enclosure. I purchased three of these to run a Windows 3 drive Storage Spaces drive. They work perfectly. Comes with a good quality USB 3 cable. You should be able to use this on USB 2, but I haven't tried it.

Enclosure wakes and sleeps the drive just fine. On system power off, the drives power off.

Sleek looking enclosure -- very nice activity light bar -- not too bright.

No fans -- none needed. Aluminum case radiates heat well.

Very nice build quality except as described below.

Cons: Conventional vertical aligned wall wart. Not a transformer, but still vertical so it won't line up on a plug strip. No excuse for this these days.

Also, very fine thread screws that hold the case together. Be careful with these. Not a problem, but the corresponding threads in the case could be easily stripped out. Coarser screws would be better.

Also --- hmmmm --- they ship these enclosures with fine thread drive screws, the kind used to secure optical drives. HDDs use a coarser thread and have done for years. Someone is picking the wrong little bag of screws. If you are a hobbyist like me, you'll have plenty of spare screws to correct this error. If you aren't, that's a problem.

So close, but no home run. Four stars instead of five for lack of attention to details.

With just a little effort these could be perfect. Get with the program Thermaltake!

Other Thoughts: Cons are relatively minor. I don't hesitate to recommend these enclosures. If I need more enclosures, I'm buying more of these.

Pros: This little external drive housing has all of the bells and whistles that spell FAST. It it connects to the PC via a USB 3.0 connector which transfers data up to 10 times faster than through a USB 2.0 cable. I would suppose the only true limitation on read and write speeds during data transfers would be the physical capabilities of the hard drive installed into the external. It has a nifty power switch so one does not have to plug and unplug the power cable over and over again to turn in on or off. Lastly, you do not need a hard drive housing with fans. Hard drives produce extremely low heat and the aluminum housing does just fine and looks perfect.

Cons: There were very few cons that I found when purchasing this external drive housing. The first would be that there is only a single USB 3.0 connector and no other connectors. I knew this going into the deal though. On the other hand, if that one port fails, ever, the housing is dead. Lastly, the only other issue that I noticed was that the included hard disk drive mounting screws are too big (wide) for the female screw holes on a WD 2TB green drive. I literally force fit them into the drive to get the fit properly done. I honestly don't expect those screws to ever come out as I am sure the female threads are stripped. Of course, I won't know until I try and I am not going to further strip anything unless necessary in the future. I recommend including proper width and thread mounting screws in future Silver Rivers Thermaltake...bad manufacturer.

Other Thoughts: Not many, I "made" this external housing work. It didn't fit like a glove but it sure looks like it and works like it. Other than that, I am pretty impressed