#### External Hard Drive Enclosure Question
 

Sup All -

I have alot of hard drives (PATA) with captured video on them and I am looking for a solution to use them via USB or firewire so I do not have to open up the computer case to swap them out.

I was under the impression that External Enclosures was the route to go, but the descriptions make it look like they are for backup storage.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks

externals with Sata set ups are decent .. fast and easy to access ..we have them all over the place up here .. as well I use a shuttle system in my racks to seperate content to individual HDs .. just slide in the HD with the site on it .. and add to the data base ..

I think this may be your best option...

http://dvice.com/archives/2007/10/us...ou_plug_in.php

I've considered buying one myself a few times.

Thats something, plug it in like an old 8 track tape. :1orglaugh Its alot quicker than the external CASE method also...

The ultimate would be if they had one with 4 to 6 bays.

I bought an external enclosure with ethernet, i.e. a LAN NAS.. Just plug it into my network and the HD is accessable from any computer.. pretty nice.. My next one might be the D-LINK DNS-323 which holds 2 HDs that can be configured for Raid 0/1 and the net connection is gigabit.

^^ Nice.

I cant figure why they keep changing the names around (ATA,IDE,SATA,PATA). You could buy the wrong thing with all of this jargon.

SATA is the thin red cable style drive.
PATA is the wide (usually grey) ribbon cable drive.

Upon further review, these dock stations are for SATA drives... Im looking for something that works with the older IDE (PATA) type drives.

Use a mobile rack... I just bought one of these for SATA and another for PATA, they work great:

http://www.kingwin.com/mobileracks.asp

Make sure your have the depth in your case for them though.

Looks like we have a winner. Do you have to boot down to swap them out?

PATA? I don't even know what that is, and I'm to lazy to look it up. I got this one today:

http://i19.tinypic.com/7x9zkv6.jpg

But it's for SATA... :Oh crap

Edit: Ok, now I know what PATA is. :P

There's some nice IDE-to-USB converters out there.
You just plug them directly into the hard drive and connect it to your PC via USB cable.
That's what I use.

^^

I just called a local shop and they answered it. Thanks for the link, Im going to pick up a few now. :thumbsup

Nice... PATA doesn't allow hotswap, and only a handful of SATA chipsets support it.

put them in external usb 2.0 enclosures, buy wireless router (N), usb hub, and badda bing badda boom

He's using them for video and USB is SLOWWWWW. I can't emphasize enough how shitty and slow it is.

Firewire is 400 Mbit/s
USB 2.0 is 480 Mbit/s

The enclosures I got are direct connect... so its not USB or firewire.

Thanks again dready.

PATA harddrives are inside of new MacBook AIR