Bootless USB to SATA Controller

Last week I bought a 1T USB portable Verbatim case with model#: 53039 and serial#: RP211X102347. The plastic USB case houses a Toshiba hard disk and a USB to SATA controller with serial#: 200514081421.

To my surprise I realised that I was not able to boot my macbook from this external USB disk after installing OS X Lion onto. After several attempts with other working bootable images on different machines, I ended up taking apart the housing and mounting the enclosed Toshiba disk onto my portable SATA to USB Konig adapter kit. This time everything worked perfectly:)

It's was the first time I bought a Verbatim product for a long time now, last time must have been since the end of life of 3,5'' floppy disks and the 100MB ZIP floppies for Iomega drives; I should have stuck with WD or LaCie that do come with decent USB connector to SATA connectors.