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Conclusion:
The Ineo NA301Ue is a solid, elegant, and very usable piece of equipment, offering merely the utility of a drive docking station due to the supremely simple drive swap procedure, and for anything up to and including household backup duty, this should be perfectly adequate, even without an internal fan. Transfer rates are very good, even under USB2; with eSATA and SATA II, it should prove to be extremely fast, slick, and based on build quality, pretty reliable. Despite the issues, the thermal design of this enclosure is actually not much different than most drives and enclosures on the market, and while based on this I have a few rude words for the average drive on the market, this is not the place for them. My only reservation here is the recommendation that high heat, high performance drives like the VelociRaptor, or anything else running at 10,000 RPM or higher not be used in this enclosure; any built-in heat sinking will be mostly useless in a sealed enclosure lacking active cooling. Consumer level 7,200 RPM drives, or if available 5,400 RPM drives, should thrive here.
Now a special mention should be made of how this drive saved our bacon - when a marginal power supply was unable to support the addition of another hard drive, the Ineo was able to take the load off just enough that the power supply could keep up, and kept us working until a replacement could be obtained. The toolless mechanism got us back in business almost immediately, and we were able to continue work uninterrupted.
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