USB 2.0 external enclosure for CD-ROM and HDD $37

[ZakPC]

Originally posted by: ravana
tempting and broke are the two words that come to my mind

me 2

 

[SteveSimpson]

Originally posted by: dAv
With floppy boot, Ghost will
find and identify the drive on boot-up with the supplied USB 2.0 drivers, but it cannot assign a drive
letter to it and does see the drive after the Ghost window appears.
I had hoped to use it as an external backup. Symatech has answered two emails, but have
not come up with a fix.

try Acronis.com's TrueImage. it runs in windoze so it should output to a USB drive fine.

 

[RobsTV]

Originally posted by: kimchee411
Is PCMCIA as fast as USB 2.0? That is, if I use a USB 2.0 card on my laptop, will I be able to fully utilize a 48x CDRW with this enclosure? If not, what is the maximum rate that you can burn at with PCMCIA?

How fast is USB 2.0, and how does it compare to others?
(from usb.org)

serial port: 115kbits/s (.115Mbits/s)
standard parallel port: 115kBYTES/s (.115MBYTES/s)
Original USB: 12Mbits/s (1.5MBYTES/s)
ECP/EPP parallel port: 3MBYTES/s
IDE: 3.3-16.7MBYTES/s
SCSI-1: 5MBYTES/s
SCSI-2 (Fast SCSI, Fast Narrow SCSI): 10MBYTES/s
Fast Wide SCSI (Wide SCSI): 20MBYTES/s
Ultra SCSI (SCSI-3, Fast-20, Ultra Narrow): 20MBYTES/s
UltraIDE: 33MBYTES/s
Wide Ultra SCSI (Fast Wide 20): 40MBYTES/s
Ultra2 SCSI: 40MBYTES/s
IEEE-1394: 100-400Mbits/s (12.5--50MBYTES/s)
Hi-Speed USB 2.0: 480Mbits/s (60MBYTES/s)


PCMCIA should be compatable to at least ultra IDE standard with 32 bit cardbus, so any drive should run at max speed.

 

[wasssup]

Originally posted by: Devistater
I have one of those, exact same brand by the look of it. Works great for me. I think I paid a bit more though. Oh well

Originally posted by: Jakev3
i wonder if it has a fan... i hate those noisy fans.

Yep, a noisy fan. Sorry. I suppose you could just unplug the fan, dunno why its needed anyway.

I have a couple external cases, and two of them do not have fans (these usb2.0 cases are from the Pacific Digital 32x deal from a while back). Anyway, I put my pioneer a04 in one of them, and if used shortly after the unit is turned on the burned discs seem fine...after a couple hours, the dvd-r's burned have crazy amounts of pixelation. After I wasted about 3 dvd-r's before opening it up, I noticed the actual drive was extremely hot. Putting it back in my computer solved the problems. It also works fine in my external case with a fan. Soooo...fans help =)

 

[jclark]

Originally posted by: rhowcow2
On the compgeeks site it says "Supports up to 128GB Hard Drives". Why wouldn't it support a 200GB HD. Doesn't this depend on the MB bios and OS?

The older IDE spec only supports 28-bit addressing, giving a theoretical maximum size of ~137GB. The current IDE spec supports 48-bit addressing, giving a theoretical maximum of ~144 petabytes. Depending on the chipset of the onboard IDE controller on your MB it may be possible to upgrade to the current spec and use drives bigger than 137GB, but that is not necessarily the case.

The enclosure has an IDE controller based on the older specs. It can only use 28-byte addressing, so it can only see 137GB of the drive at most. (I suspect you'll be able to see 137GB, not just the 128GB the specs say. If you stick a bigger drive in, you'll see it as a 137GB drive.) Since it can only see 137GB, that's all the computer at the end of the USB cable is going to be able to see.

As a side note, the enclosure may not use the same drive geometry settings as a PC. So if you stick a formatted drive in the enclosure, it might not be recognized as being formatted. If, at this point, you decide to format it, it'll work fine in the enclosure, but won't be recognized when in a PC.

 

[pilgrim2u]

newbie here

I have an old maxtor 17 gig drive that I used MaxBlast from Maxtor on it about 3 years ago. I tried to get this 17 gig HD to work with an old p133. I could partian the drive with maxblast, but upon any restart, the HD could never been seen by the p133.So.....I have never used this drive

The question is, when I place this 17 gig maxblast HD in an enclosure, will it be seen by my toshiba laptop usb 1.1 XP service pack 1?
Will I be able to F disk this 17 gig in the enclosure??

Any suggestions?