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A disk enclosure is a specialized casing designed to hold and power hard disk drives or solid state drives while providing a mechanism to allow them to communicate to one or more separate computers.
Drive enclosures provide power to the drives therein and convert the data sent across their native data bus into a format usable by an external connection on the computer to which it is connected. In some cases, the conversion is as trivial as carrying a signal between different connector types. In others, it is complicated enough to require a separate embedded system to retransmit data over connector and signal of a different standard.
Factory-assembled external hard disk drives, external DVD-ROM drives, and others consist of a storage device in a disk enclosure.