SABRENT mSATA to 2.5 Inch SATA III Aluminum Enclosure Adapter (EC-MSSA)

FAST, CHEAP, RELIABLE, What more could you want? REVIEW: Sabrent mSATA to 2.5-Inch SATA III Aluminum Enclosure Adapter (EC-MSSA) SUMMARY: Arrived perfect condition, well packaged, easy to use without instructions, performance was on par with what I expected from my MSATA drive. One note is that the picture show the case screws going into the wrong set of holes. (the screws go on the inside set of holes, not the outside as shown in the picture). It even came with a screwdriver. UNBOXING: (see picture) INITIAL IMPRESSIONS: Perfectly met my expectations for the price. I wanted something cheap and quick and that is what I got. I saw a few horror stories in other reviews, but I’m glad I ignored them. Aluminum case to diffuse any heat (not that I found there was any). PERFORMANCE / EASE OF USE: INITIAL SETUP: My “old” laptop died and I wanted to reuse the 512GB MSATA card that I installed in it a few years ago. Once I had the card out of my laptop, I transferred it to this case. Screwed it down with included screws. Then I added the side screws to the case, and dropped the whole thing into an external USB enclosure I had left over from some drives I shucked for my NAS. Anyway, I plugged it all in, the drive was instantly recognized and I was able to quickly backup any leftover files from my old laptop. My MSATA card by the way is a Samsung EVO 840 MSATA 500GB PERFORMANCE: I was worried about heat, but there was none at all. Performance was close to SATA II speeds over USB 3.1 chassis that I had. I don’t expect any issues long term. Next, I will likely install the drive as a new boot drive in a spare laptop I have. SUMMARY: I would recommend this to anyone who needs a quick way to rescue / reuse and old MSATA card. Especially if they are going to put this into another device. I’m not sure it would hold up on its own as an external drive (without a full case around it).

I bought this because of how pleased I was with a previous Sabrent purchase, the external USB SATA drive housing. The cleverness of the mechanical design was just great - it snapped together trivially with no tools - and electrically it worked seamlessly. This device was the same. I bought this because I had purchased another mSATA to SATA adapter, and it worked fine electrically, but it gave me problems mechanically. It would work loose from time to time and my system would say "no drive present". So I had high expectations for this purchase, and Sabrent did not disappoint. What a thoughtful design. A cloth strap to help pull the clamshells apart. Screws to firmly hold the mSATA drive inside the housing, and a quality, dimensionally correct housing, and more screws to secure the housing shut. No fighting required to get it together, or to get it to mate with my machine. It's exactly the size and shape of a hard drive, and the housing appears to be good quality powder-coated metal. The screws all mate easily with the screw holes. My only slight sadness is that I wish they had included the four screws that affix the drive to its bracket in my machine. Fortunately I had both saved my old screws and was able to find them. Lastly, I turned the machine back on and it just worked. No surprise - it's Sabrent. Keep up the good work, guys!

This little mSATA to USB reader worked well, is built well and shows the finishing touches of a class product. Sabrent included a tiny Phillips screwdriver for disassembling the shell, and included a spring loaded retainer to hold down the opposite end of the mSATA drive from the data/power connector. Extra case screws were also in the package. We have other Sabrent readers for drives and SD cards, all work very well and are very affordable. The only tiny quibble we have is a bit of wiggle room where the USB port attaches to the motherboard where the case has two metal pieces folded over to hold the case on. Some tiny dabs of RTV silicon fixed this problem.

I ordered this device to get access to data on a laptop's disk before e-cycling the laptop. The adapter worked perfectly. The instructions for installing the mSATA card were not correct (they never mentioned that you have to unscrew the end cap on the case), but it did not take long to figure out what you needed to do to install the drive. My computer identified the drive without any problems right after the drive was attached to a USB port. I was able to easily access files on the drive and ultimately format the drive. A nice metal case protects the adapter, but other aspects of the design are not so good. The adapter card is loose within the case and can be heard jiggling around inside when you shake the case.

I had an unbootable SSD in an old laptop. I wanted to format the drive and start over. When I plugged the Sabrent into a functioning desktop computer, I didn't find anything in File Explorer. I tried a few times then searched online to find out what to do if you can't see a drive in File Explorer. I found advice to go to 'Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions.' Once there, I could see an unknown drive the correct size, but couldn't find any menu choices in the Partitions menu which were not greyed-out (unavailable). Right before giving up I found one active menu choice allowing me to delete the main partition on the old SSD in the Sabrent. I deleted it, and then chose 'format'. Then I chose to assign a drive letter. Once these steps were completed, I could see that ssd in File explorer with the drive letter I gave it. I re-installed the SSD into the old laptop and then installed Windows on the ssd. Success. The old Desktop PC never treated the drive in the Sabrent as a USB; it was displayed as a SCSI. I don't care because it worked. The laptop works well now.

Very nice, small piece of equipment, for a good price. I ended up buying two of them because I was worried about reliability. I tested them out somewhat extensively and both seem to work as advertised. Long term, I'm unsure of how they will hold up, but they seem legit. Hopefully I can address a few complaints that I read in the reviews. The design is nice and simple, clean, and appears to be machined well. It doesn't have a big, glowing logo on the front of it like some designs, which I'm really happy about. It's TINY. I would prefer a shorter USB cable, but don't mind the one supplied. It's short enough for my needs. Even the tiny LED light is unobtrusive, unlike some items where the LED lights up a dark room. I'm using it with a Samsung 1TB EVO 850 mSATA drive, with a 2015 13" Macbook Pro. I cloned my internal 1Tb drive to the external one, copying about 650Gb, which took over an hour to complete. That may sound like a long time, at about 180MB/s, but I'll explain that later... After the drive was cloned, I booted from the external mSATA drive without a problem in both of my enclosure units (just swapped out the SSD). The enclosure gets hot. Obviously. It's supposed to get hot. That means it's doing it's job properly as a heatsink. With the amount of data I was transferring, I shutter to think how hot the Samsung "T1" drive would get with it's plastic casing. Plastic is an excellent insulator, and aluminum is a much better choice as a heatsink. If anyone is unaware of the Samsung T1, look it up. I was trying to replicate that, except with better components. The enclosure got too hot to the touch midway through the cloning process. After touching the device for about 5-8 seconds, it became too unbearable to touch. It didn't really burn me, just was painful, and not unlike the heat produced by my spinning mechanical drives. While it was running at that temperature, copy speeds seemed to be about 150MB/s. I believe this is due to the Samsung 1TB EVO 850 design that intentionally throttles the write / read speed to protect itself. I had read that drives of less capacity in the EVO 850 line perform a lot better because they don't get so hot (something about power management). Things got interesting when I placed the drive on top of a piece of thin aluminum as an additional heatsink. The drive almost instantly cooled to the point where I could hold it in my hand. After that, copy speed picked up visibly. I'm sure that in a pinch, if you needed to work that drive hard, you could place it on some aluminum foil and that could further dissipate the heat. For my purposes, I'm using it for data back up when I travel. So all of my media should be backed up and in my pocket at all times, unless of course I'm using the laptop. I always keep the two copies of files in separate places in the event of theft. This little 1TB mSATA drive is going to be AWESOME for that, and fat better than my old LaCie rugged mechanical drives. If you want to use this as an external boot drive, I'd recommend going with a more traditional format, since these small form factor drives are not really meant to be in an environment without adequate cooling. If you are like me and you want a tiny little USB drive that can hold 1TB of data that you occasionally need to read and write to, look no further. A Samsung 500GB mSATA SSD may be even better if you don't need the capacity.

well made - fair price - win,win

easy to install and working great.