Making internal HD into External

[dNj]

I'm about to purchase a new HD this week. I see that internal drives are cheaper than external and an external enclosure runs around $40. Is it just wishful thinking on my part that I simply buy an internal drive slap the external enclosure on top and I've saved myself $$$. If any, what are the downsides to this? I prefer to make my drive external as I will be purchasing a laptop soon and want to keep the same HD. I want to take out my current desktops internal 120g and make that a 2nd external for my laptop.

Will the original specs of the HD's RPM, buffer and seek still be the same since I will be using USB 2 Vs. IDE connection?

Is there anything else I should watch for when shopping for hd's/enclosures?


Thanks,

[johnnymk]

I have a no-name external case using USB 2.0 and am totally satisfied. The speed transfer is incredible.

Actually, I believe that the transfer rate is faster than the IDE bus.

[Showtime]

I don't think he plans to carry the external drive around, it's just for home use. A place for him to store stuff.... ;)

I like the little extenal encloser and they even have some that carry 2 or more hd's and dont take up valuble space.

-jel:halo:

[Showtime]

Your office on the junky side?

Noo. Who'd of thought...

:P

BTW, peanut butter goes great with so much stuff.

-jel:)

[Devhux]

I recently had the opportunity to play with one of the external 3.5" drive enclosures, and it definately worked great (virtually no performance decrease over a USB 2.0 connection -- although your CPU usage might be slightly higher). My local computer shop actually steered me in this direction after letting me know they didn't have the 80GB external Iomega drive I was looking for at first.

Some external drives that manufacturers sell contain a 2.5" hard drive, which generally means that they can actually be powered directly from the USB or Firewire port -- but this seems to be the exception, not the norm.

[Showtime]

Originally posted by DarkFury

Sounds like that "feminine side" of you ain't finished coming out... :D

What ju talkin bout DF? :shifty:

This hea is man talk. We are talking the finer points of computer hardware. No place for sissies and that sort ya hea.

-jel;)

[bachviet]

I have two hard drives in two external enclosures (no name) and both work fine.

[ribitch]

go fw800. fw800 is about equal to ATA100.

USB2.0 is 480Mbps, and FW400 is 400Mbps. These drives equal the speed of what would be ATA50.

THe drawbacks of USB is it has a high CPU usage and sustained speeds are equal or less than those of FW400.

FW800 PCI cards are decently priced for the speeds they allow.

[verve247]

Originally posted by GuruX
I recently had the opportunity to play with one of the external 3.5" drive enclosures, and it definately worked great (virtually no performance decrease over a USB 2.0 connection -- although your CPU usage might be slightly higher)....


Use the firewire port and you won't see that higher cpu usage.

[ramazank2]

I have a USB 2.0 case by MOBILE DISK model HD-337-U2 works good. It is really small. Since it so small there is no cooling fan and there is AC/DC power converter cord as big as the ones for laptops. I have been using it for about a year and half for backup.