eSATA Drive Enclosure Power Switch Mod

I’ve been using two 1.5TB Samsung USB 2.0 drives for extra storage for a while.  They work fine but the limited bandwidth of last-generation’s USB can be sloooooooow.  The drive enclosures look great but copying data at 25 megabytes per second is a pain in the ass.

I started looking for new USB 3.0 enclosures on some web stores and had the bright idea to look on eBay.  Even on eBay these new enclosures were a little pricey, but then I came across an auction for “used” eSATA enclosures.  Apparently these were Iomega drives that had the hard drives removed for some reason, and the seller had a lot of them.

The new modded drive enclosure

I have not been using the eSATA features of my motherboard.  After checking the motherboard manual I discovered that its eSATA line ran from a separate controller so I wouldn’t lose any SATA connections.

To make a long story short, I bought two of these external drive enclosures for 15 Euros ($20 for you Americans) each, including shipping!  What can go wrong at that price?