On 20 Jul 2007, at 13:04, Albert Hopkins wrote:
...
Enclosures are great when you want to keep a drive in there. But in
the case that you want to - say - pull the hard-drive out of your
laptop and plug it into a desktop PC for just a few minutes these
"adaptor cables" are very useful indeed. The link above prices them
at $17 - a price at which, IMO, you can't go wrong.
Sorry I was under the impression he was using a dedicated drive for
the
purpose. I have a drive/enclosure that I lug around from machine to
machine. Though, if it were me, I'd still get an enclosure if just to
have that future capability.
I don't know about this particular case.
I originally replied off-list because there was some Windows stuff I
mentioned in my message that I felt to be off-topic & inappropriate
for the list. The link that I gave was simply to say "get one of
these, and backup, whatever you do".
I personally find this kind of dongly external adaptor to be more
useful for temporary & ad-hoc use. In my house an external case will
very quickly find a spare drive shoved in it and I'll fill it with
"archive and backup" material. When I'm working on installation of a
new machine & dd'ing partitions around I'd rather leave no room for
error and not have a drive with that kind of stuff on it connected to
the machine.
Additionally, in my experience, external drive enclosures are
designed to take either an 2.5" or 3.5", EIDE or SATA drive, but not
all kinds. The product I linked to is very versatile and will
accommodate any of these drive types that I happen to have lying
around, happen to be able to pull from my playstation or happen to
need to work on. I fix PCs for a living and this is in my bag always
- I'm sure it's used on average as often as once per week or ten
days. I haven't experienced the problems Neil Bothwick describes -
maybe mine is from a different batch or factory - although I have
(not recently) had it decline to work with some (older?) 3.5" EIDE
drives.
YMMV, horses for courses & it may depend how often you need to use it.
Stroller.
