I'm a newbie trying to consolidate all my hard drives, and I'm looking into external USB enclosures. Can I get some clarifications? Thanks in advance for any tips and help.

-) Do aluminum cases really not require fans?

-) I remember it was extremely dangerous to hot-swap a IDE HD rack, but are USB enclosures really hot-swappable as many sites advertise?

-) (legacy question) How painfully slow is transferring over USB 1.1? For instance, from your experience, the time it took to transfer...5 or 10 or X gigs onto an external HD.

-) are there any highly recommended or highly un-recommended chipsets/brands/models?

-) Does a DC power feed really increase the HD's life?

One of the many I looked at: http://www.imagestore.us/product.a [...] -3520USB-C

1.) Only cases designed to connect directly to the hot components are able to operate passively. Since these cost several hundred dollars, I'll assume you're looking at standard cases, all of which require fans.

2.) USB drives can be connected/disconnected while windows is running, just click the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon on the task bar.

3.) USB 1.1 is 1.2MB/s max. That's 100x slower than the fastest drives peak performance (from cache), and 50x slower than the average drive's max transfer from media. It's also 25x slower than the SLOWEST part of most modern drives.

4.) I recommend nVidia chipsets mostly for AMD processors and Intel chipsets mostly for Intel processors. I stay away from VIA chipsets because that company screwed me as a service person.

5.) DC power feed?

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