"You can never be to rich or have too many backups." Part 2 (Part 1 is my review of the 6TB hard drive now installed in this enclosure.)
So why use this FireWire and USB enclosure? Why not a Thunderbolt enclosure? Price! I'm thrifty. (My spouse says 'Admit it, you're a cheapskate!') This older FireWire and USB3 enclosure was much more cost effective for my backup needs than a Thunderbolt enclosure. This enclosure also has USB3 for the newer, speedier Macs in my family. Because the primary purpose for this drive is Time Machine backups, not active storage, a difference is throughput is not significant. It only becomes relevant when restoring data. As part of my backup strategy, I also make a weekly Clone of my primary storage device to another external drive, so I'd likely never need to restore the entire machine in the event that the primary storage drive fails.
Why not just use Network-Attached-Storage? It's part of my total backup strategy, but no longer the PRIMARY backup means. Several years ago, I began using a major brand of Ethernet-ready NAS (but NON-Apple) network-attached-storage enclosures using RAID1 for multiple Time Machine backups for all of the 6 Macs in my home network.
Over time I encountered enough 'For reliability, Time Machine needs to begin a new backup' messages that I began to doubt the wisdom of Ethernet-connected NAS drives as a primary strategy. My Time Machine backups performed over Wifi seem especially prone to 'New Backup' messages. So I moved back to directly attached Time Machine backup drives for each of our family of Macs, using portable USB drives for the laptops, Firewire drives for my iMac, and Thunderbolt-connected enclosures for my Mac mini media server.
So what and I doing with the Ethernet NAS enclosures? Because you can add both direct-connect and network devices to a Time Machine backup rotation, as part of my total backup strategy, the laptops, the Mac mini, and my iMac still continue to do Time Machine backups to the NAS drives, using wired Ethernet for the best reliability.
I've only had this enclosure in operation for a week, so I haven't checked 'durability' as a Pro for this product. With no fan, I don't expect any problems with durability of this enclosure, and the drive runs very cool in operation, so lack of a fan is not a shortcoming in this case.