UGREEN 50422 Powered 3.5/2.5-Inch SATA Enclosure, 5 Gbps

Overview

The UGREEN 50422 is a powered case that turns a 3.5-inch desktop hard drive, or a 2.5-inch drive, into external USB storage for a desk. It takes SATA drives up to 26 mm thick, comes with a 12 V, 2 A power adapter and a 1 m USB 3.0 cable, and links at up to 5 Gbps. It suits backups, archives and media libraries built from drives taken out of PCs and recorders.

Is it right for you?

• Suits one 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch SATA I, II or III hard drive or SSD, up to 26 mm thick.
• Suits a desk, because it needs mains power. For a pocket drive, choose a 2.5-inch or M.2 enclosure instead.
• Not for IDE/PATA, M.2 SATA, M.2 NVMe or mSATA drives, and not a multi-bay RAID unit, dock or offline cloning station.
• Use with a TV, router, PlayStation or Xbox depends on that device’s own storage rules.

Key features

• USB 3.0 link up to 5 Gbps through a detachable 1 m USB-A to USB-B cable.
• 12 V, 2 A power adapter so desktop drives spin up properly.
• UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol), drive health (S.M.A.R.T.) pass-through, LED status, a power switch and 3-minute auto-sleep, where the host software supports them.
• Black ABS case with a shock-cushioning strip and ventilation openings underneath.
• 521 g.

What else you need

A 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch SATA drive, a computer with a USB-A port and a mains socket for the adapter. Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS are listed.

Installation

Open the case, slide the drive onto the SATA connector, close it, connect the power adapter and the USB cable, and switch it on. Initialise and format a new drive before first use.

Before you buy

• The drive is not included.
• 5 Gbps is the USB link ceiling; mechanical hard drives are much slower than that in practice.
• It does not bypass passwords, BitLocker or FileVault encryption, or unsupported file systems, and it does not repair a failing drive or replace a backup.