USB enclosures: You don't always get what you pay for

Barry Brown (see the above link) was seeing poor performance when attaching a USB hard drive to an Apple AirPort Extreme router. He ran several tests with different enclosures and found that an el-cheapo enclosure performed better (sometimes much better) than a more expensive enclosure.

In the computer/electronics industry, it's not too unusual to see cheaper products outperform more expensive products, but this is a lesson that is easy to forget. Mr. Brown's example underscores this fact.