Build your own External Hard Drive

I know couple of people who do just that. You can buy 3ft long sata and sata power cables. They just run them outside the computer and switch disks in a matter of moments. Those water cooling holes in the back of most cases can have more than 1 use.

essenbe said:

I have and use both. I prefer esata because I always get faster speeds with esata than USB 3,0. In fact, I'm currently looking for a laptop and have found a few I like, but no esata port. I scratch them off my list. USB 3.0 is definately much faster than 2.0, but my experience is esata is faster. It has other uses also. You can boot from esata but not from USB 3.0. eSata comes in handy in other ways too because the computer sees it as the same as an internal drive.

If a laptop you are considering has a ExpressCard or PC Card slot (many don't nowadays) you could add an eSata adapter that way.

strollin said:

essenbe said:

I have and use both. I prefer esata because I always get faster speeds with esata than USB 3,0. In fact, I'm currently looking for a laptop and have found a few I like, but no esata port. I scratch them off my list. USB 3.0 is definately much faster than 2.0, but my experience is esata is faster. It has other uses also. You can boot from esata but not from USB 3.0. eSata comes in handy in other ways too because the computer sees it as the same as an internal drive.

If a laptop you are considering has a ExpressCard or PC Card slot (many don't nowadays) you could add an eSata adapter that way.

The biggest problem is finding out those details. many of the sites don't bother to tell those type of things. But just from looking around, it seems that Toshiba is more likely to have some of the more advanced things like that. I don't know about reliability though.

Great article Doc, you should make this a tutorial.


Can't remember when I got my first 2 1/2" external enclosure, it was IDE and my spare HDD was less than 1GB.
Still have a 20GB IDE HDD in an external enclosure.

Just found this NewEgg Video on installing

Well, I really like these new HD Dock units. Here is another that I just got to test. It has 1 slot for SATA & 1 combo slot for 3.5 / 2.5 IDE HDs.

This SATA HDD Dock allows you to plug any 2.5'' or 3.5'' , SATA or IDE Hard disk to your computer via USB port, and using two HD at the same time. It functions as a 2-port USB hub and card reader as well. The device is compatible with both PCs and Mac.

Features:

• Supports Double SATA/IDE HD, Standard, convenient and trendy design
• Supports E-SATA,USB1.1, USB2.0, SATA I, and SATA II compatible
• 2-Port USB 2.0 HUB, Hi-speed USB2.0 data transfer rate up to 480MB/s (Max), SATA II transfer rate up to 3GB/s
• Supports 2.5/3.5 inch SATA/IDE Hard Drive, up to 1TB × 2＝2TB
• Multi-Card Reader for SD/MS/CF/XD-memory
• Plugs and play and hot-swappable
• Power LED indicator
• On/Off switch
• OS compatible: Win7/Vista/XP/2000/ME/98SE, Mac OS 9.x or higher
• Power adapter: Input 100-240V, 50-60Hz, 1.0A ; Output 12V-3A, 5.0V-3A
• Dimension: 165.5 x 110 x 102mm
• Weight: 237g

Made a 32gb Windows backup to a 2TB SATA HD in about 20 mins.

I'm always leary of these do it all products, with Japanese or Chinese written all over them. When it comes to data, I just don't like to take chances. My Thermaltakes are all solid, and pretty cheap to boot.

Doc, gotta link to that all-in-one?

Is this the same one? NEON all-in-one Dual HDD dock