Iogear 2.5" Hi-Speed USB 2.0 Ion External Hard Drive Enclosure II (GHE225U)

by Iogear

Product Details

Product Manual [586kb PDF]

• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0000BZ2W5
• Item model number: GHE225U
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: March 8, 2005

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

IOGEAR's 2.5" USB 2.0 ION Drive is the perfect solution for storing and protecting your valuable documents, as well as audio, video and other high-volume media files. This bus-powered, attractive and compact enclosure boasts USB 2.0 compatibility and is slim and lightweight enough to easily accompany the mobile professional on any assignment. The ION Drive supports data transfer rates of up to 480 Mbps and is also backward compatible with USB 1.1 specifications. This enclosure is very easy to connect to your PC or Mac desktop or notebook, is hot swappable and Plug-n-Play, and accepts ATA-5 hard drives. The 2.5" USB 2.0 ION Drive is backed by IOGEAR's 3 year Limited Warranty.

Product Description

IOGEARs 2.5 USB 2.0 ION Drive is the perfect solution for storing and protecting your valuable documents, as well as audio, video and other high-volume media files. This bus-powered, attractive and compact enclosure boasts USB 2.0 compatibility and is slim and lightweight enough to easily accompany the mobile professional on any assignment. The ION Drive supports data transfer rates of up to 480Mbps and is also backward compatible with USB 1.1 specifications. This enclosure is very easy to connect to your PC or Mac desktop or notebook, is hot swappable and Plug-n-Play, and accepts ATA-5 hard drives.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great cheap solution., August 19, 2004

By 

Gareth (Providence, RI) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Iogear 2.5" Hi-Speed USB 2.0 Ion External Hard Drive Enclosure II (GHE225U) (Personal Computers)

After my Compaq Armada fried it's logic board, I had a doorstop that would cost more to repair than it was worth. So I bought a new laptop, but wanted to get the files of the old hard drive and wanted to have a backup drive. My old drive was a perfectly good IBM 2.5" drive, so I pulled it out of the broken laptop and bought the ION enclosure. The installation was a breeze, just remove the bottom cover, slip in the drive, and replace the cover. 3 minutes, tops.

I plugged the drive into my new laptop's USB 2.0 port and voila (WinXP home)! Transferred the old files, and backed up the new files in about 2 minutes. I then took the drive over to my wife's iBook running OSX 10.3 and plugged it in. It read the drive fine (even though the disk was FAT32) and I was able to back up files from her computer also.

Not only is the enclosure functional, but it's very sleek design. Looks nice, bus powered so no need for a wall wart. Totally quiet. Fabulous, best computer purchase I've made in a while.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars No support for over a month, too late to return, April 27, 2005

By 

DrZ (Chicago, IL, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Iogear 2.5" Hi-Speed USB 2.0 Ion External Hard Drive Enclosure II (GHE225U) (Personal Computers)

Got this USB 2.0 enclosure for 2.5" drives over one month ago. IOGear claims it works with ATA 5 and ATA 6 drives; however, I cannot get it to work with my ATA 5 Toshiba MK6021GAS 60 GB 2.5" drive; not even with the extra USB/PS2 power cable. The drive spins properly but never appears in OS and gives a bunch of "bad disk" errors in event viewer in any computer.

So, I took the drive, put it back into my laptop, wiped and re-created the partition, formatted it and ran a thorough surface scan for errors and even restored a ghost image of this laptop on it with no trouble found. After that I tried contacting support four times: submitted support requests twice in two weeks on their web site (it seems like support is outsourced and not related to IOGear) with no response; third time the support web site didn't even work. Fourth time I sent an email message to their support email addres found at iogear's web site. NEVER RECEIVED ANY RESPONSE. I complained to my vendor, who literally replied "They suck." and asked me what other brand I'd like to use instead.

In addition, the enclosure manual is just a copy of other IOGear manuals for enclosures containing a hard disk. They didn't even bother to alter the manual for this version or include instructions why and how to use the extra USB/PS2 power cable and left it up to techies like me to figure it out themselves, or up to an average user to call a techie friend or throw the extra cable away as a redundant item not listed anywhere on the box or in the instruction manual. The enclosure manual states that the drive comes preformatted, which cost my CIO a big confusion because there is no drive until you install it, and his drive was not preformatted, so he had to call me to figure it out.

This unit works with another ATA-6 drive I have, but poor (in this case actually a lack of) support is always a deal breaker. I wasted way too much time on this product and never got it to work with the drive I want. After this experience, IOGear is on my black list (to use a less offensive term).

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Cheap connectors, August 24, 2006

By 

D. GUZMAN (Texas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Iogear 2.5" Hi-Speed USB 2.0 Ion External Hard Drive Enclosure II (GHE225U) (Personal Computers)

This case has a nice slim design and it worked like a charm, until the USB port broke. It seems the materials they use are not very high quality.