[geeks] external USB hard drive cases

[Doug McLaren]

On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 11:40:52PM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:

| 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.

Actually, it's not that bad.

I recently picked up a 160 GB ATA (not SATA) drive in a USB enclosure
from Fry's for $50 after rebate, and got sustained (many gigabytes --
I'm NOT talking bursts here) transfer rates *under Linux* of about 22
MB/s.  Which really amazed me, because I was used to Linux's USB 2.0
stuff being about half the speed of Windows.  I guess USB really
improved from 2.4 to 2.6.

Under Windows I did get slightly faster, about 24 MB/s, but not that
big of a difference.

| 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,

I've got an older one that can't go over 128 GB, but the newer ones
have no such problems.  Not surprising ...

| 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.

Nope, though my favorites are the ones that 1) use a standard USB
cable, and 2) don't use a wal-wart or inline transformer, but instead
have the transformer inside the enclosure.  Alas, the cheap ones are
usually not like this.  It's also nice if they have a fan, but the
ones that are metal rather than plastic can often do without it.

For something to cart between work and home, I use a 30 GB laptop
drive in one of the 2.5" enclosures.  It's a good deal slower, often
around 8 MB/s, but far more portable, and is powered by the USB bus
itself.

-- 
Doug McLaren, dougmc at frenzy.com
Everyone talks about apathy, but no one does anything about it.