Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I purchased the Sabrent EC-UASP (date: 2015/07/17) with the intentions of using it with a Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD as an external backup and storage device. As someone who has worked with both consumer and professional ATA/SATA and SCSI/SAS storage subsystems, and have familiarity with ATA protocol in addition to USB specifications, I tend to have high standards, so when reading my review please keep that in mind. Below are my opinions that justify a 2-star rating, with photos included: * A review from 2015/01/23 states, backed with photo evidence, that the EC-UASP uses an ASMedia 1053E SATA-to-USB bridge IC. However, the product I received uses a JMicron JMS567 SATA-to-USB bridge IC (USB vendor ID 0x152d, product ID 0x1567). JMicron has a track record of designing fairly buggy and unreliable storage ICs, often compounded with bad performance and quirky behaviour (i.e. SMART pass-through is often not supported or done incorrectly), and as such I avoid their chipsets; I prefer (for consumer use) ASMedia if possible, and the 1053E is indeed worthwhile. That said: I cannot tell if the IC in question is a real JMicron IC vs. a pirate replication (but usually pirated ICs lack silkscreening -- this IC was silkscreened). * Read I/O performance using aforementioned SSD was quite disappointing -- ranging between 95MByte/sec to 120MBytes/sec tops. The same SSD when hooked to a native SATA600 controller gets literally 3x that performance. This was with UASP enabled in my UEFI BIOS, using an Intel XHCI USB 3.0 host controller (PCI vendor ID 0x8086, device ID 0x1e31, revision 4), a subset of the Intel 7-series chipset. OS used was Windows 7 Ultimate SP1. I forgot to take screenshots of benchmarks, and for that I apologise. * The USB descriptor data for this product was bizarre, and differs from what the user manual depicts. The USB Manufacturer string is "FinalLap", and the Product is "Go To Final Lap". No I'm not making this up -- this is really what the SATA-to-USB bridge IC returns as part of its descriptor data, which Windows (and other OSes) will show as a device called "Go To Final Lap". I have not the slightest idea what this refers to, but the manual depicts a device called "NS1066". Descriptor strings that are strange like this often imply pirate/imitation ICs. * The USB connector used on this device is a type A connector, which is not spec-compliant. Type A is intended for host controller connections or backplane of a computer. A USB 3.0 type B connector should have been used, specifically USB 3.0 Micro B given the limited height/form factor of the product. * As another reviewer noted, the build quality of the enclosure itself is disappointing. The product is very difficult to open, and in doing so you feel like you're going to break it (given that things are held in place with tabs made of plastic). However, unlike a (different) reviewer stated, it appears Sabrent now includes both a glued-in piece of foam (towards the front of the enclosure), as well as a wider piece of foam, to keep thinner MHDD or SSDs from "shifting around" inside of the enclosure, so at least Sabrent did something about that, albeit somewhat ghetto. I'm not sure I'd trust using an MHDD in this enclosure as a result; SSDs have no moving parts, thus no vibration, so those are fine, but MHDDs (in my opinion) mandate use of screws. I'm still in the market for an enclosure, so sadly I can't recommend one that's identical in style/form factor as this. But if you're wanting something that's reasonably priced, spec-compliant, uses an ASMedia 1053E SATA-to-USB bridge IC, and supports 3.5" drives as well as 2.5", check out the Plugable USB3-SATA-UASP1 (that's "Plugable" with one G, not two).