Antec MX-1 Actively Cooled External Hard Drive Enclosure

The time to think about backing up your data is definitely not AFTER you’ve already lost it.  The typical data-loss scenario plays out time and time again – the user has had a hard drive failure and has either permanently lost their data or they’ll have to pony up a pretty penny to get a data recovery service involved in its retrieval.  That’s when they start thinking about regular backups and the equipment and software that’s needed to backup their data. 

Having had over-heating issues with backing up entire hard drives to a passively cooled (and sometimes a completely sealed) enclosure, I always go out of my way to look for an external hard drive configuration that includes active cooling – that means there’s a fan somewhere that pushes air through the enclosure to help the drive run cooler.  The configuration that I’ve found the most satisfying of late is the combination of the Antec MX-1 Actively Cooled External USB/eSATA Hard Drive Enclosure and a SATA drive of my choice.  For the setup below, I went with a Seagate Barracuda 500Gig SATA drive to put in the enclosure – mainly because of its 5-year warranty and partly because I’ve had pretty good luck with Seagate drive reliability.

The enclosure will run about $50 and the 500Gig HD will run about $95, so for less than $150 you’ve got a 500Gig external hard drive with active cooling.  No worries if you’re concerned about the noise that a fan might introduce, the fan is so quiet I can’t even tell when the unit is turned on.  If 500Gig isn’t big enough for you, again no problem, just buy a bigger hard drive from the manufacturer of your choice.  I unboxed the enclosure and hard drive and had it plugged in and working in about 10 minutes.  All you need is a phillips-head screw driver.

I know what you’re thinking – you can probably go down to the local Staples or the like and get a 500Gig external USB drive for less, probably around $100-$129.  The thing to note is it would most likely be passively cooled (ie: no fan) and it’s probably only got a USB connection.  Many also only come with a 1-year warranty.

The Antec MX-1 does both USB and eSATA, with eSATA being a much faster mechanism for data transfer.  Additionally, the MX-1’s are stackable, so you can stack them vertically, and since they’re actively cooled, they won’t overheat.  Heck – you can even stack a few of them up and mirror them or set them up as a RAID 5 array for added data integrity (Note:  a RAID card may be needed if your motherboard doesn’t support these mirror/striping features, nowadays, many do). 

The array of cables that comes with the unit are also pretty impressive – it comes with a USB cable, an eSATA cable, an external power supply and an eSATA-to-SATA bracket.  You can use the bracket to plug into the SATA port inside your computer and connect the enclosure via the eSATA interface to get the fastest data transfer rate.  Those cables and brackets alone would probably cost you as much as the enclosure itself.  Since the unit has its own power supply, you can benefit from the fast transfer rates without having to wedge another hard drive into your computer (which may or may not be possible) and without having to beef up the power supply in your computer to handle the additional power load that adding additional hard drives brings with it.

With the changes that Vista and Windows Server 2008 made to the backup mechanisms (no support for tape drives), I plan on hooking one off these to each of my servers and workstations.  They’ll definitely help me sleep better at night.  I’m also looking into scripting file copies of the backup files to an offsite location for additional disaster recovery peace of mind.

Let’s do things a little differently…let’s think about backing up our data BEFORE we’ve actually lost it.  A wise man once told me that if you don’t have TWO copies of your data, then you don’t have any backup at all.  Do YOU have TWO copies of your data?  If not, just ask yourself how much time/money/effort is it going to cost you if {insert computer here} loses its hard drive today?

Doug White
http://twitter.com/cpuguru