WD Elements SATA 2.5" USB 2.0 HDD enclosure teardown / what’s inside

[Kiriakos GR]

One rescued 160GB WD SATA hard drive from a heavily damaged laptop, become the reason to seek one nice enclosure box for it.
Sign of vanity or not I liked to be a genuine WD brand for this WD hard drive.

For 9.99$ find this on eBay and only one seller looks currently to carry this WD Elements enclosure as empty, so to add your own hard disk.
Few years back WD did use this box as enclosure for some of their hard drives, and there are few videos about it on YouTube.

The point is that I am not convinced that this is a genuine product.
It came with a piece of foam with dual side sticky tape instead of rubber mount points.
No instructions of how to use this foam.
The PCB looks good regarding soldering, but the circuitry is very sensitive regarding output voltage of the USB port that is going to be connected.
For example it did failed to work at the front ports of my PC box, and I had to connect it on the rear USB port on the motherboard so to operate and to recognize the HDD.
I do have and another HDD enclosure with an 2,5” IDE HDD, never had an issue regarding USB port voltage with it. 

After attaching those sponges over some internal markings in the plastic case, and by trying to assemble it with the HDD and the PCB connected together I got in to a new problem of bad design.
And I had to remove one set of sponges because the PCB it was unable to get in place.

Finally I did manage to do an almost perfect work by sorting out all those bad design issues with a bit of extra patience.

The controller IC is probably made by OXFORD storage solutions, which looks as serious manufacturer.
I did run few benchmarks just of curiosity and the performance it is acceptable for my taste.
http://www.plxtech.com/products/consumer/das

One last thing that worth to be noted is that this enclosure is made 100% by plastic and so if you feel more secure with an aluminum enclosure you better skip this one.
Or spent (as I did) another 5.5$ for a EVA Protect Pouch for 2.5 Inch hard drive enclosure, so to store and the USB cable in it.

I am presenting this story mostly about helping and other lost souls who are interested about it, because my own research over the internet prior getting it, it did not show any results.

[Kiriakos GR]

Part 2

[Kiriakos GR]

Part 3