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Has anybody ever heard of an External Hard Drive Case Enclosure?

roberttitusroberttitus
edited September 2010 in General Chat
So while browsing newegg I found this thing that claims that you can place any SATA hard drive into it & then plug it into your USB port to basically use it as a flash drive. Supposedly you can use it to recover files from the old hard drive & even use it as a second hard drive for your PC.

If it actually works it would not only be a great (& somewhat inexpensive) alternative to actual flash drives but useful in recovering files that you would have taken to be lost forever.

Can anybody confirm if these things actually work?

Comments

  • CyphoxCyphox
    edited September 2010
    Welcome to the world of tomorrow!!

    worldoftomorrow.jpg

    yes, those things work.

    for 3,5" hard disks you need an additional powersupply, not that comfortable.

    if you buy a 2,5" case/harddisk, you don't need a powersupply, it gets all the power it needs from the usb-port(s). either the hard disk works with just 1 port or you have to use a y-cable that uses 2 usb-ports
  • jp-30jp-30
    edited September 2010
    If you can't get data off a drive when it's mounted internally, you're probably not going to get it when it's added externally via USB either. I guess if you have a corrupt C: that prevents the computer from booting, this is a good 'first try' technique to examine the drive from another PC.
  • roberttitusroberttitus
    edited September 2010
    jp-30 wrote: »
    If you can't get data off a drive when it's mounted internally, you're probably not going to get it when it's added externally via USB either. I guess if you have a corrupt C: that prevents the computer from booting, this is a good 'first try' technique to examine the drive from another PC.

    Not exactly what I was going for... Kind of like in my case where my old laptop died & so I couldn't access the memory from my old hard drive without first taking out the hard drive from my new laptop. This way (& this is just assumption of course as I have never actually tried it) I can get that old material back & have extra memory for my new laptop as well.
    Cyphox wrote: »
    Welcome to the world of tomorrow!!

    worldoftomorrow.jpg

    yes, those things work.

    for 3,5" hard disks you need an additional powersupply, not that comfortable.

    if you buy a 2,5" case/harddisk, you don't need a powersupply, it gets all the power it needs from the usb-port(s). either the hard disk works with just 1 port or you have to use a y-cable that uses 2 usb-ports

    What do you mean by 2,5 inch & 3'5 inch?

    2.5 & 3.5 or something completely different?
  • TorTor
    edited September 2010
    3.5 inch is the type of hard drive typically used in desktop computers. They are faster and have greater capacity but are more power hungry.

    2.5 inch drives are laptop drives.
  • skeeterskeeter
    edited September 2010
    My brother has a docking station type thing that he puts a sata drive in, so I figure that's the same kind of thing. It works quite well... We both have NAS devices, so we use it to back each other up, in case one device goes kaput.
  • JFreemanJFreeman
    edited September 2010
    Or you can go even more high tech and get a hot swappable one, you just yank a drive out and push it in with no screws or anything.

    We have one set up because when you have literally hundreds of HDD's lying around its a lot faster to find out what's on it when you can just slot it in.
  • LeakLeak
    edited September 2010
    It's usually called a SATA dock, and it's quite real - I use that one for backing up my server, which thanks to eSATA goes quite a bit faster than USB 2.0...

    np: The Fall - Frenz (Rebellious Jukebox Volume 3 (Disc 2))
  • roberttitusroberttitus
    edited September 2010
    Leak wrote: »
    It's usually called a SATA dock, and it's quite real - I use that one for backing up my server, which thanks to eSATA goes quite a bit faster than USB 2.0...

    np: The Fall - Frenz (Rebellious Jukebox Volume 3 (Disc 2))

    That's not what I'm talking about.

    However this is
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817366014&cm_re=external_enclosure_2.5_sata-_-17-366-014-_-Product
  • Chyron8472Chyron8472
    edited September 2010
    Basically what that does is, it allows you to change an internal hard drive into becoming an external one, by providing an external protective case and a plug that connects the HDD's SATA socket to a USB socket.

    Blah blah technical jargon... but essentially what it boils down to is that you could either buy a prebuilt external hard drive, that already has the hard drive in the enclosure, or you can get a internal hard drive and an external enclosure (which means you need to buy a hard drive to put in it, not just buy the enclosure.) The enclosure allows you to use any hard drive of any capacity, so long as it has the proper physical dimensions to fit inside the enclosure and it must also have the correct connector (in this case SATA) to connect to the enclosure's plug.

    Which should you get? It all depends on price, disk capacity, and how much it really matters to you to be able to someday upgrade the HDD to a larger capacity without paying for a new enclosure.

    And also yes, there are different enclosure sizes/hard drive sizes. There are HDD's that fit in desktop computers, and those that fit in laptops. Laptop hard drives are smaller physically, but they cost more as a result. The same can be said for external hard drives of comparative size.



    ... or you could buy flash drives. If you really need a terabyte or so of space, then go right ahead and get an external hard drive. But if you don't need massive worlds of space, and would rather have your data on a device you can fit in your pocket, you're better off to buy however many flash drives is necessary to fill the space requirements you're looking for.
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