I've got a couple extra drives that I don't use very often. other than the obvious detriments of slower speed with usb and lack of protection from dirt/damage of an unenclosed drive, are there any other downfalls to just using the drive itself with an IDE to usb adapter?

I was just wondering since I've got a few extra drives lying around and rather than getting enclosures for all of them or switching them in and out of one enclosure this seems like it would be easier/cheaper.

will doing this damage the drive or decrease functionality in any noticeable away (aside from firewire capability in an enclosure vs just USB with the adapter)?

Other than dust, vibration, noise... no, it ought to be fine...

There are, however, the obvious downsides:

1. USB sucks.

2. A drive... hanging out... outside the computer? Moisture, dust, static shock, noise, the possibility of being bumped while running, vibration, the possibility of the cable coming loose because you've jerry-rigged it...

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Gurm, please stop flaming like this... and you really should mind your language! We try to build a positive atmosphere on the forums and this kind of behaviour isn't doing that any good! Sure you can put your opinion here, but do it in a civil way please!
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haha alright, i'll take that as one vote for the enclosures.

i don't want you to think I don't value the input, but for my uses, I think those are all acceptable trade-offs when you consider the cost of a adapter versus a decent enclosure and also the convenience of being able to switch out multiple drives.

at this point I have a box of drives in my closet so I guess it's not much worse than that haha.

i guess this post was sort of pointless because it just confirmed my thoughts on it...it's not the best setup ever, but for storage of files I don't need to access that often and ease of switching out multiple drives, it's probably going to be what I go with.

I wouldn't recommend it, drives withous cases are quite fragile. There are other options though. If you get a 5,25" external enclosure (be it USB or FireWire), you can put in a harddrive swap bay (cheap ones come for low prices; don't expect miracles from them, but they work fine for incidental use) with multiple harddisk carriers. This would make swapping easy and it's pretty cost effective.

I wouldn't worry too much about using USB for harddrives. Ok, it's not really fast, but for some things, it just works alright. I've been using my external USB2 harddrive for quite a while now (I store MP3 and DVD images on the drive) and I can't say I dislike it. Speed is good enough (copying a full DVD5 image to the drive takes a couple of minutes, but that's okay as long as you're not in a hurry), no reliability problems at all and it sure is cheap. Of course, FireWire will give you much better performance.

ok i think i semi-grasp this...

but wouldn't this still require me to buy multiple enclosures if I wanted to use my other drives?

then i could just switch them (enclosure and all) in and out of the bay, correct?

If you make sure you can buy a swap system of which you can get additional drivebays, you'd only have to buy a few of these bays. Drives can be put into the bays really fast (I do that myself quite a lot ) so if you have (for example) 3 bays, it may just suffice. For me it does!

thanks for the info. at least that gives me another avenue to look into!

Man, what is it with you and USB? It may not be the cleanest, fastest interface out there, but USB2 it does a good job of connecting hard drives or dvds.

Moisture, dust, vibration and noise aren't any different in an external enclosure.
If it's one of the cheap closed ones, perhaps you could have an overheating problem, but I've kept a 120gb drive in one for ages without it ever complaining. 3.5" 7200rpm hard drives are made to cope with heat.
If it isn't one of the cheap enclosures it's likely to have a fan in it. This means MORE noise, MORE vibration and probably more dust inside the box (not that it matters; being filtered, hard drives don't care about dust).
You can bump bare drives running just as you can bump enclosures running. That by itself won't do squat, and if you bump them hard enough to drop them an enclosure won't save your drive.
Static shock... that might be a plus for enclosures, because they shield the drive's circuit board. But if you have some screws and some plastic panels you can protect the boards with very little trouble. And if you don't, well, just be careful not to touch the bare boards.
As for the cables coming loose, they are generally very resistant. I've never bumped one off, and I tend to juggle around my drives quite a bit.

In conclusion: my suggestion is to go for adapters. If you don't care about the aesthetics of the thing it's certainly the cheapest and most cost-efficient way of connecting external devices. Also note that while enclosures are made only for drives of their size (or smaller), you can connect an adapter to pretty much everything. And you can't ignore the fact that you can get 2 or 3 adapters for the price of one enclosure.

I have to agree with fallingwater.

reasonsnotrules, if you want you can attach drives to you pc case with double stick tape (or double stick foam tape). Some dvd drives allow side mounting, so you could easily stick them to the side of the case thats away from you.

something tells me that taping a drive to my computer case probably isn't the greatest idea ever..my case sits on the floor and makes a nice footrest while I'm surfing the internet haha. my desk has adjustable shelves in the top hutch-like part. the smallest adjustment is basically hard drive sized. I was thinking a usb adapter, drill a hole in the backing of the shelf for the cord to come out, and the hard drive can live up there. this is why i've been looking for ones with the power connection coming out of the connector itself rather than a completely separate power cord.

if that makes sense...for example this instead of this

Either will work fine, just make sure the drive/circuit board bottom doesn't short out.

Just keep in mind that the chipset will effect the speed you can use to burn and read on optical drives. I also have bad experiencies with the Syba adapter. Very cheap power supply.

Yeah, kinda.

Adapter... $20. Enclosure... $25. I'm failing to see the problem here? Spend the extra few bucks, unless you have a bunch of the adapters laying around already.

USB is a SERIAL BUS. It was never intended for things like hard disks and DVD drives. It was intended for mice, low-bandwidth cameras, etc.

Firewire is the logical successor to SCSI, and as such is the better choice.

But since not everyone has Firewire, they're stuck using USB.

The cause of 99% of incompatibility and problems with external devices is the USB interface, or the lousy USB chipset on the other end.

Firewire PCI adapters are generally under $10. Go for both, as firmware updating through firewire is a no-no.

I don't know where you're living, but here where I am it's more like Adapter -> €15/20, enclosure -> €40-50.

USB1.1 was definitely intended for low bandwidth stuff, but the 2.0 upgrade solved that problem. Who cares if the whole USB standard wasn't intended for high transfers in the beginning? Hard drives weren't intended to store hundreds of gigabytes either, but through use of better technology, today they can. I don't see why it should be any different for USB development.

Who cares about SCSI? It's good for servers, but for a standard home computer SCSI is totally overkill.

I have two USB2.0 hard drive enclosures of the cheapest, nastiest kind I could find (still cost me €30 each) and one USB2.0 adapter cable. I also have one fancy Firewire external enclosure with fan and all (€40). None of the USB2 interfaces have ever given me any trouble. The enclosures have happily ran hard drives for hours at an end without a single hiccup. They can't run my DVD burner, so I bought the adapter, which can run it at least at 8x (haven't tried 16 yet). The adapter doubles as a usb pendrive when used with an old 1gb laptop hard drive I had kicking around. I have bought an identical adapter for my girlfriend to use with an old 40gb drive I gave her. Neither adapter has ever misbehaved, either.
The firewire enclosure, in contrast, likes to fall on its face every now and again for no apparent reason, and get windows to give me one of those nice "Delayed write failed on G:\$Mft" errors, whereupon whatever I'm running from that drive crashes (which is bad, considering I keep most of my games on it) and I need to switch the enclosure off and back on to get the drive recognized again. It does this often enough to be annoying, but not enough to be so frustrating that I want get the thing replaced.
I might well have gotten a dud enclosure, but my experience has definitely been better with USB. And even if the FW enclosure worked flawlessly, I still don't see where all this incompatibility you talk about is.

Good old US of A. Today at New Egg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817145125

That's a USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure for $25.99, for the link-challenged.

USB doesn't get an IRQ. Ever. Even if you assign one to it. It's an interruptless interface. It's a "low priority" interface, like the serial and parallel ports. Even the new USB2 interfaces defer to EVERYTHING ELSE on your system. So if you're using your USB2 DVD burner to burn a disc, and... heaven help us... your antivirus program decides to ping your floppy drive... guess what craps out? That's right - the USB interface.

Have device manufacturers coded around this with clever driver tricks? Sure. But you still can't set a USB transfer going and DO ANYTHING ELSE on the machine. Sorry.

That's a common misconception because of the recent trend in IDE advancement. For years, all Macintosh machines were 100% SCSI. No firewire, no USB. You wanted to plug in a scanner? SCSI. Printer? SCSI. Hard drive? SCSI. Floppy drive? SCSI. You could run ANYTHING (except video) over the SCSI bus. It was intended for peripheral support for home computers at low cost.

IBM and Compaq never jumped on the bandwagon. Instead, they designed MFM and RLL interfaces for hard disks. Oh sure, you could buy a nice Adaptec SCSI adapter - for a lot of money. But ask anyone who has used a SCSI system and they'll tell you that it's far and away better than an IDE system. Everything runs smoother. Concurrent hard disk accesses are the big advantage.

Does it matter TODAY? No. Today, SATA drives are nice and fast. But not daisy-chainable. You want 25 drives on a system? Still gotta go with SCSI.

Firewire has all the same benefits - it's got an interrupt, it's daisy-chainable, it supports massive amounts of devices, and high transfer speeds.

Except that you can't rip digital audio with them - or are you forgetting that you just posted a thread complaining about that?

You did get a dud enclosure, or else a dud Firewire controller.

And over USB it's a GOOD idea?

Sata 2 & 3 and NativeCommandQueing when fully implemented are
gonna finishing burying the scuzzi interface, server motherboards are dropping it.

scuzzi "peripheral support for home computers at low cost???."

Well, at that price it becomes more of a matter of deciding whether you want something to keep your drive in or a easy to move around adapter to connect drives of various kinds without bothering with screws and taking the enclosure apart every time.

Big deal. Burn-proof and all its clones exist to prevent an occurrence like this from causing terminal damage to the burn process. The moment the USB interface comes back to life the burning resumes and all is well.
Writing on a hard drive instead? Well, it's not exactly a terrible problem to have to wait ten seconds while the computer unfucks itself.

I must have magical powers then, because I do it all the time... sometimes I even copy large amounts of data (we're talking about tens of gigs) from one usb connected drive to another, and the computer remains perfectly functional. It's not like it's using the parallel port, for heaven's sake.
You can't play Quake 4 as it's shunting data, but you can definitely browse the web, write or do other light activities.

Again: who cares how it was intended to be? What it's turned out to be is a horrendously expensive and unnecessarily fast interface.
What do I need odd-sized 12000rpm screamers for in a desktop machine? For home computing tasks ATA66/100/whatever is perfectly sufficient.

At risk of being repetitive: who cares?
Who needs 25 drives on a home computer? Even if you are one of those people who share a terabyte of stuff on p2p networks, with today's large capacity drives all you need is, oh, 4 300gb 7200rpm PATA or SATA monsters.
It's different if we're talking about servers, but then the whole USB2 argument becomes pointless, because nobody would ever use either USB or Firewire drives in a server.

USB supports 127, if memory serves me right.

As I answered you in that thread: they still work fine for everything else. This is a little of a bummer, but it's still not enough to prefer other interfaces over it.
I'm not saying firewire isn't good, mind you (if I thought so I wouldn't have bought that firewire interface at all); all I'm saying is USB is good too, and doesn't deserve the bashing you're giving it.

I don't think it's the controller. I'm using the builtin port in a Toshiba notebook, it isn't a yum-cha cheapo PCI controller card bought in a flea market.