[geeks] external USB hard drive cases

[Bill Bradford]

On Tue, Jun 06, 2006 at 12:10:30AM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> I can't afford SCSI, so I'm leaning toward a decent SATA drive, like a
> Seagate Barracuda.  
> I'm also leaning toward USB 2.0 interface, mainly because it is common.
> I thought about eSATA, but don't know much about it, and there aren't a
> lot of enclosures to choose from.
> Anyone have any recommendations?  Preferrably, something you've used
> yourself.

If you're going to hang it off USB2.0, don't bother with SATA, unless you
*really* want to - the performance bottleneck will be the interface, not
the drive, and you won't get more than 10-12 megabytes/sec transfer rate
regardless of what drive you use.

I've got a bunch of these "bare kit" USB2-to-IDE kits in service and have 
yet to have a problem with any of them, or find a drive that they didn't
work with:

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=USB2IDE-N&cpc=SCH&srm=0

You can't beat $11 for power supply and interface cable.  I'm using
one right now to hook a Lite-On IDE DVD burner to this iMac (with the drive
in a gutted Sun 411 CD-ROM enclosure), and have another hanging off the PC 
in the other room with a 120G disk on it with the disk just sitting on the
table.

I've also got a USB2 to SATA interface that's similar:

http://www.directron.com/satac35u.html

$19, and one of these is hanging a 250G SATA drive off the same iMac.

Bill

-- 
Bill Bradford 
Houston, Texas