External Hard Drive Enclosure To My Data Rescue

Ok so this past week my pc no longer worked apparently there was an input/output error. At first I thought it was a virus. Since the OS would freeze up and the hard drive seemed to be active. So I booted up a flash drive I had prepared with Linux, antivirus, and some partition utilities, but that was in vain. Unable to scan drives, they would appear and then be gone. Until finally one of the antivirus scanners said something useful "Input/Output Error" while trying to access the hard drive. Convince of such a problem I went to my local electronics retailer, well maybe not that local, but the one I prefer to go to. I purchased a simple external enclosure from Vantec the model appears to be the NextStarCX. Here are a few pics of what followed....

In the picture above you can see where the hard drive will be placed on to connect to the SATA connector.

 This is just the actual case its got a nice look to it and so far since I have used it 3 days, it gets warm, but not hot. So that's good.

 In the picture above where you see the green arrow is a 3 pin cable which comes from the inside of the case. A little more on this a few pictures below.

 Simple USB cable and power cable. I wish the power cable would be a lot smaller simply to connect to a surge protector, but that's another ordeal in of itself. Other than that its good. It does bring a small stand to be used, however I didn't find it useful personally, simply because I rather have the drive laying down.

 In the picture above you see the hard drives SATA connectors inside the red box and the enclosures connector in the yellow box. Simple enough to do once the hard drive is placed on top slide into the connector and as pictured below in the orange box it fits perfectly well.

 Now carefully flip over while sustaining the metal enclosure and hard drive together otherwise if you flip while holding only the hard drive or the enclosure you risk breaking off the circuit board and more than likely a non functional external enclosure. Once flipped over as you can see above there are 4 screws. Mine came with all screws necessary, but I only used two as you can see, but I'd recommend you use all four of them, again you don't want to risk damaging something(by that I mean the enclosure or your hard drive). I only did it because I was in a hurry to get my data recovered.

 Ok so once the screws are on, simply slide in your hard drive to the enclosures case up to 3/4 of the way in of the hard drive. You will see a white cable that's a 3 pin connector carefully place that cable under a tiny gap below the hard drive, but there isn't much space so you will have to figure this one out and be cautious of doing so.

 Now as you can see above the red/yellow arrow points to the 3 pin connector connected to the circuit board area. Be very careful when sliding in the rest of the hard drive into the enclosure for the white cable may be pressed hard against the case and cause the 3 pin connector to wiggle on the circuit board.

And... finally if all goes well for you I hope. You will simply put two more screws on in the back of the case to keep it all intact and so the hard drive doesn't accidentally pop out of the enclosure. once completed in the back you will see the connections for the USB and power cable and the power button. That power button is good turn on when you need it and off when you don't, especially when you will have one hard drive their permanently. Now since I have switched three hard drives in that case already I am more than satisfied with its fair ease of swapping a drive in and out. However , I don't know if swapping constantly would diminish this enclosures future use. I have to say for the price it does a very good job transferring data and its very easy to put in a hard drive. 

How many of you remember having an SNES. I remember when I first got it I kept telling my parents how I would study hard and get good grades and that I would be a good kid. Well it was no surprise that I'd be a good kid since I was shy, easily scared, and with asthma haha. The grades part was the hardest to accomplish but I did my best and I remember my folks purchasing my first gaming system. Now of course I got this during my middle school years so you can imagine how much I played. Anyone remember renting video games from your local video game shop renter? I do. I couldn't wait to go and rent games I felt like I was on top of the world with my SNES. Well, but at last some good things are memories, and awesome ones at that. If anyone tells me they were willing to pay me more than $50USD for a non working system I'm definitely going to run one extra mile today haha. By the way any of you remember jumping along with Mario just like with the Nintendo gaming system? I did all the time.
Anyways that's it for today. I have to go run later today and study for my Cisco certification. Hopefully I'll be posting some pc internal pics on how to take one apart and make a bootable usb drive to install one of the many flavors of Linux. So I'll have a full blown tutorial on that sometime in the future. Take care and may you all have a great awesome day!

The beginning

Hello everyone who by mistake or search ends up here. Just a little intro about myself. Currently about to graduate after many years of not knowing what to do, but then again I'm not the only one just one of the few right? haha. I love to run and currently I'm trying my best to live a healthy lifestyle so expect some food postings and they may not necessarily be healthy. I love to run so in light of my choice in lifestyle I expect to run a few races this year. I love computers so I will be posting things of that nature, but then again in this digital world who doesn't. I'll be doing my best to create a fun page for you to look at, even if it means you have to laugh at my weirdness, lol. Thanks for stopping by and until next time.