What is the difference of 3.5 external hard disk vs 3.5 internal hard disk with an enclosure?

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
S

smalltech

Distinguished
Apr 10, 2009
550
3
18,995
What is the difference of 3.5 external hard disk (e.g. WD My Book) vs a 3.5 internal hard disk fixed into an enclosure to work like an external hard disk?

Are both good to be use as an external drive to store backup?

What 3.5 enclosure is good?

Thanks
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
BrandonYoung

BrandonYoung

Reputable
Oct 13, 2014
1,114
1
5,960
Assuming similar link speed (USB2.0 vs USB3.0), and similar drive speed (7200RPM for instance), very little will be different.

If you get an enclosure for a internal 3.5" HDD, you could swap out the internal drive, where depending on the "WD My Book" or similar external drives, you may not be able to swap out the drive.

My external drive is really just a 3.5" HDD in an enclosure anyway...

I would suggest going for a USB 3.0 enclosure if you system can do USB 3.0. My USB 2.0 external is pretty slow, but great for long term storage.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Boogieman_WD

Boogieman_WD

Judicious
Jul 31, 2014
6,050
2
35,960
Hey there, smalltech.

@Brandon's explained is pretty clearl in my opinion. I'll just add up a bit to his comment. As you've given an example with a WD drive, here's the link which explains how things are with our external HDDs specifically: What kind of hard drive is inside a Western Digital external product?. This is different for the different manufacturers out there, but some of our external drives have proprietary connectors, which means you won't be able to connect them internally if taken out of the enclosure (which is never recommended anyway). So this makes them a bit different than standard internal drives by means of connection.
As for using an internal drive with an external enclosure - sure, you can do that without a problem. As @Brandon mentioned, if you have USB 3.0 ports on your system, it's important that you get an enclosure which also uses USB 3.0, so that you don't bottleneck the speed with the older USB 2.0 version. Another thing you should take into account is the type of the drive. E.g. if you decide to go for a WD HDD and want an internal drive to be used with an external enclosure, I'd recommend the WD Green rather than a WD Black drive, because it's designed to be used as secondary storage and runs very cool and quiet (which are pretty important features for an external drive). As for the WD Black drive - it has great performance and feature which make it a very good gaming/video editing drive, but of course it's a bit less quiet than the WD Green drive and all those are not features you'd need in an external HDD. This was just an example of the fact that it's pretty important to choose the correct model for your enclosure, no matter the brand you decide to go with.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Boogieman_WD

Boogieman_WD

Judicious
Jul 31, 2014
6,050
2
35,960
No, it doesn't have a fan in the enclosure, but it does have opening on the back side so heat isn't really a problem for it. And to answer your second question - it's always better for computer components to run as cool as possible, so basically you could say that this might be true to some point. However the reliability and durability of the drive inside is what really counts. So it's up to you to decide if you want to get an external HDD or an internal drive with an external casing of your choice.
And if you have any other questions about any of our drives, I'd be happy to help. :)
 
Upvote 1 Downvote
jsmithepa

jsmithepa

Polypheme
Jun 14, 2014
13,096
263
60,840
On the "streets" there are no internal drives with enclosure. Once is in a enclosure, it automatically is external, but am sure somebody is gonna invent a new term.

For your purpose a backup SHOULD be external, you wanna keep your backup at some distance from the box that you are backing up from. If you wanna go "purist" about it, folks even keep their backup drive OFF SITE in case of theft/fire etc. If you have USB3, that's clearly the interface of choice, but USB2 is OK too if you are just gonna turn on the backup and let it run overnight. To keep the drive cool, am fan (no punt intended) of those enclosure that looks like a big heatsink, with fins, they are called passive cooling and rid the necessity for a noisy fan.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom