Except oddly enough, you can frequently buy a drive wrapped in a USB enclosure for 10-15% less than the bare drive... Plus, the sleep modes on a lot of "consum

Except oddly enough, you can frequently buy a drive wrapped in a USB enclosure for 10-15% less than the bare drive... Plus, the sleep modes on a lot of "consumer" drives significantly slow them down when used in a desktop environment (as well as creating second long pauses in RAID arrays with more than 5-6 drives), and the option to disable that "feature" is slowly disappearing on drives without the "enterprise" tax. Market segmentation shenanigans like this would never fly in a healthy competitive market are now very common.