An external enclosure case i need info on..

[SE14man]

Would i be able to fit any IDE hard disk in this case?
I don't want to go and buy the wrong product!
Would PATA be IDE?

Here's the link anyway

http://www.macotechnology.com.au/products.asp?cat=Enclosure&pid=2049&pdone=1&showpd=0&...wpd3=3.5%20USB

Cheers!

[Heywould3]

Yes.. that will work.. PATA stands for Parallel ATA Sata serial ATA. PATA is the old standard. SATA the new. its funny you posted this.. i was just in the market for one that had support for both lol.. thanks for the link

[edDV]

Yes.. that will work.. PATA stands for Parallel ATA Sata serial ATA. PATA is the old standard. SATA the new. its funny you posted this.. i was just in the market for one that had support for both lol.. thanks for the link

These are fairly generic for PATA to USB2. You usually pay more for USB2 + Firewire.

SATA to USB2 is possible but better to explore SATA to eSATA interface which is faster than USB2 or Firewire. USB2 is the bottleneck here.

[redwudz]

If you have a unused SATA port on your motherboard, then a external SATA drive will be well worth looking into. SATA-E uses a different connector that is more stable and harder to accidentally unplug than just a regular SATA connector. But the regular SATA connector works just fine. Check your external box to see what it uses.

Any SATA hard drive will work. Most SATA drives are SATA ll at present. If your on-board controller is SATA ll, then your external SATA ll drives will operate at their full speed.

The big advantage of external SATA is that any drive in that type of setup runs the same speed as a internal SATA drive, 150 or 300Mbps or at least faster than any other external drive outside some special SCSI drives. The length of cable is about 1 meter or about 3 feet, so you have some latitude to set your drives in the best location.

It's easy to set up. You can get a PCI slot SATA adapter for a few dollars and use that for your external SATA drives. Your external drive should have it's own power supply. The external SATA drives are hot pluggable and run circles around USB or FireWire drives for performance.

PCI slot to SATA adapters from one site: http://www.cooldrives.com/insaexsa1ppc.html

External SATA drive boxes from the same company: http://www.cooldrives.com/sataenclosures.html

I don't necessarily recommend either. There are others out there in both categories. Remember the big advantage is high speed and hot plug capability. Even if you don't have SATA on your MB, it is fairly inexpensive to add a PCI SATA controller. Some already come with external connections for external drives.

[Dr_Layne]

If you have some old IDE hard drives lying around like I did after a MB upgrade, I recommend one of these:

http://www.addonics.com/products/raid_system/mst4.asp

I had four IDE drives in my computer that I could no longer use because my new MB only had SATA ports. So I bought one of these mini towers it connects four IDE drives via one USB connection. You can combine the drives as one large drive, two large drives, or four individual drives. Works great.

A_L