external drive cases

Question

Just figured I'd throw it out there that you can buy external cases now for internal hard drives and DVD/CD drives. The ones for laptop HDs are as little as $10 and the ones for the big drives are about $25 if you want one with a built in fan, audio outputs, and power supply & cables included. These cases convert the drive to USB 2.0. I have yet to try to burn anything, but I did put a NEC ND-3550A dual layer DVD burner into an external case and it does read files just fine. I also plan to put a 20GB 2.5' drive into an external case. Since I have a Latitude C610, I also have a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card and 1GB RAM, which I think you would want if you're going to burn DVDs. Hopefully that little test will end well. I hope the USB 2.0 connection is fast enough. Any experiences are welcome. Message Edited by jnasta on 02-08-2006 01:17 AM

JersWork · Answer

I write DVD's at 8x and 16x with my NEC3500A in an external USB 2.0 enclosure with no problems.  I also have a 250GB drive in an external USB 2.0 enclosure and it works great for me as well.  I used them with a C800 and a C840 both via a Belkin USB 2.0 PCI card in a C0Dock II station.  I now use both via a USB 2.0 port on my current notebook.

Catman-Jag · Answer

Hi - What did you do for a driver for the dvd burner?  I've been able to put a 40GB drive on a USB-IDE adapter, but cd and dvd is not reliable.  I haven't try to burn anything on an external drive.

JersWork · Answer

I use a Belkin 4+1 port USB 2.0 PCI card in a C-Dock II station with a Latitude C840,  and it works reliably with the NEC drive in an external enclosure.  The big issue is that the drive firmware update can't be done while the drive is in the USB enclosure.  The enclosure I bought also does Firewire,  and the drive worked great that way too until I f'ed-up the firewire chipset by attempting to update its firmware too.

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