Product i wondered if existed...

[SE14man]

I was wondering if instead of a USB invention like this thing:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812156102

If there was the same sort of thing to connect to hard disks but instead of having a USB cable, having a firewire one.
I am sick of USB...

[Krispy Kritter]

Then switch to eSATA. If your MB doesn't have (most don't) an eSATA connector, you can get an addon SATA card that supports it. Then you can use the external enclosure of your choice that supports eSATA.

If you are looking for an external device for temporary HDD access, there is this unithttp://<a class="contentlink" href="http://thermaltakeusa.com/product/Storage/hdd_stat...tation.asp</a> for SATA devices.

[seinman]

I haven't been able to find SATA to Firewire external cases either, after an extensive search. The best option, as Krispy Kritter said, is probably eSATA. Unfortunately, I have a laptop, so i'm out of luck in that department too.

[redwudz]

You can use a external SATA enclosure for hard drives or other devices several ways. If you have unused SATA connectors on your motherboard, you can get a PCI slot SATA adapter connector panel.


This one's for eSATA, but they also have regular SATA panels. You can get external enclosures with either type of connector and install your hard drive or optical drive in one. Some also have optional USB connectors, so you would have that option if needed. But the SATA connection will give you the same speed as a internal SATA drive.

Or you could get a PCI(e) card that has external connectors, or use a PCI panel adapter if it only has internal connections.

With a laptop, you can get a PCMCIA card with SATA connectors. These from NewEgg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Description=pcmcia+sata&x=16&y=26

SATA has some great speed advantages over USB or FireWire. And you don't need added drivers with newer OS's like XP or Vista.

A few SATA enclosure sites:

http://www.cooldrives.com/usb20cdrwdvd.html
http://www.cwol.com/serial-ata/sata-drive-enclosures.htm
http://www.xpcgear.com/sataenclosure.html

[jagabo]

I haven't been able to find SATA to Firewire external cases either.

Like these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010090092+1053807123+1054...e=USB+%26+1394

[SCDVD]

If you use a SATA to USB adapter, your data transfer rate will be very slow compared to SATA performance. Even though you may find an adapter that works, it won't even come close to a decent transfer rate. The same is true for firewire. These gizmos can be useful in some specialized cases but they aren't a good way to attach a drive to a system for normal use.

[rallynavvie]

That adapter is pretty great, I use it for troubleshooting and data recovery all the time. I think everyone else got lost on the whole SATA thing that they may not realize you're working with IDE drives you probably have sitting around. SATA would be a good way to go in the future though...

I used to be able to buy FireWire bridge boards from some other online distributer (Granite something) for making my own custom enclosures. They also had some great hot-swappable FireWire enclosures that had hotswap bays for IDE drives (and SCSI and SATA). I used to have an internal version of that which used the FireWire HBA for archiving to large IDE drives before SATA was everywhere.

[SE14man]

Well thank you very much everyone for all your help!
Was still very helpful and something i am seriously considering for the near future.
I did forget to add the most important bit! lol
It's an IDE drive and the cheapest one i can find is this:
http://www.wiebetech.com/products/ComboDock.php
Personally i think it's a rip off.
But yes, this sort of thing is ideal!

Cheers fellas.

[jagabo]

$169?! Just buy a $30 firewire -> IDE encolosure and use the innards.