today at officemax i found a cendyne 52x24x52 usb 2.0 external. it is black and the model listed on the back is LTR-52246 (yes it is a 52246 in there) it was on the clearance table for $29.00

i pulled it out and put in one of my 48161s and it worked for dvd playback.

involved in some naughty chat so i will have to wait to power down so i can throw in a 411 or 811 out of this system.

damn thing will not let me upload images so i am going to have to upload them to my website first

the drive in the enclosure (it sucks to open)


the drive being detected:


device mgr:


nero info (not on the scsi chain if you notice)


burns in same time:


buffer would drop to 89% and then back up to 98% while in the 8x part of the burn but it would not buffer underrun

sweeeeeeeeeet.. I wanna do that!
and u got a rebadged pioneer hehehe
cendyne 52x24x52 ,pioneer makes those drives :P

ummm no actually it is a ltr 52246:

Now thats a hot deal! $30 is the usual price for a cheapo USB2 enclosure. So you got drive for FREE! Nothing wrong with the 52246 drive, it writes CDR very nicely I've got 2 of them.

How's the performance of u're dvdburner in the enclosure using usb.

Have you done parity checks to see if it burns better, worse, or same as when hooked up to IDE? Transfer rates sometimes affect quality of burn.

Just curious...I might get an enclosure myself if burn quality is the same. I don't burn dvds too often so it probably makes more sense for me to not have it hooked up when i don't need it.

Burn quality is about the same whether in an enclosure or on the IDE channel. (811s in bytecc USB2.0 enclosure).

kprobe looks the same but i can't post pics without putting them on my server and i am done with that for now

It is nice to see that I'm not the only one to think of this very effective cost saving measure.

My Bytecc ME-320U2 will be arriving tomorrow via FedEx. It is nice to get next day service for two dollars and some change. (That because the company I'm buying from is in the next city over.)

I just need to get a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card for my laptop.

I'll be using it with a Pioneer DVR-A07U.

I picked up one of these also. Do you have any advice on how to get the enclosure open with breaking it

N/M - I got one side to open and then the rest was clear.

CenDyne USB 2.0 Enclosure - Replacement procedure

This enclosure is very easy to open IF (big IF) you know what to do.

There are 6 tabs holding the case together (four on the main body and two holding in the face plate). The face plate tabs are located on the sides.

Face plate removal: Take a very thin blade/pin (a jeweler's flat head screw driver or straightened out paper clip) and gently insert in the center on side of faceplate. This will depress the plastic clip that holds the faceplate and it will slide right out.

Spliting Case: Same concept, there are two places on the side seam that are thin rectangular shaped openings. Insert the thin blade/pin in these two locations and the clips will be released. I did have to push a little harder on the last one I removed. Up until that time I had used the paperclip and it was bending so I used my smallest jeweler's screw driver.

Remove the shield across the top of the drive (four screws - two on each side). Lift shield out and disconnect the IDE cable, Molex power connector, and Audio cable.

Removing Drive: Once case and shield are apart, there are two screws under the plastic feet in the front. The plastic pads need to be pried off (keep them clean and they will stick again). Remove the two screws and lift the drive to disengage the plastic pins that are inserted into the bottom two screw holes near the back of the drive. You don't need to remove the two screws on the back plate. They hold the USB stuff in the case and not the drive.

Done.

I put a Lite-On 811S DVD burner in the case. This was an easy fit since the 811S is slightly shorter than the CD-RW. Works great.

Btw- Thanks for the pictures, it helped me figure this one out.



Reassembly is the reverse except that the case will click together nicelywithout the blade.
Temporary pics for disassembly

you did far better than i did. i pried and pried to get it open and then figured out that the front needed to come off first so my case has a couple of scars.

one suggestion i might make in your pics you show that static shield not touching the drive. i moved mine ahead one screw hold so it will contact the drive. this is kinda important since it makes sure the drive (which is spinning discs pretty fast) will not build up a static charge. it grounds the drive to the neutral on the power supply.

Thanks, I updated the pics to include your recommendation on the static shield.

Anybody tried a hard drive in one of these enclosers yet?

You can put a HDD in almost any USB2 /Firewire enclosure.

But... don´t expect same transfer rates as directly connected on IDE bus

USB 2.0 is "a distant last" compared to ATA133 or more exotic Firewire setups. About 40% throughput compared to standard ATA. Not a problem for the CD and DVDs but should be noticable in a 7200 rpm hard drive setup.

Benchmarking Link

I've gotten about 30MB/sec putting a WD 100 gig 7200RPM drive in a USB 2.0 enclosure. It only got 40MB/sec on ATA133 (though it's only ATA100).

There are so many variables. OS, the controller used, the enclosure used, the drive that's being enclosed, the phase of the moon (j/k), etc.

Incidentally, the benchmarks above are made by a Apple fan, which makes me wonder, as Firewire is one of the things that Apple likes to emphasize.

using sisoft sandra, and doing realtime tests by copying stuff, I can also second that firewire is faster than usb2 in MY situation. As Code says, it depends on setup, but for me, fire reigns over usb2.

i've got a pc and i've gotta say that firewire beats usb2 any day hands down . . . i've got two enclosures - one for my hard drive (http://www.byteccusa.com/product/enclosure/ME-350.htm) and one for my dvd burner (http://www.byteccusa.com/product/enc.../ME-320-bk.htm) . . . i got the usb2 and firewire combo models . . .

when i transfer a dvd iso (~4.7gb) from the hd enclosure to my internal drives it takes approximately 8min . . . however, with the firewire it takes about 6min! . . .

this actually shocked me cuz i thought usb2 was faster because of the 480Mbit bandwidth whereas firewire is only 400Mbit . . . but i realized that usb is more cpu dependant and this slows it down

yup, that's right. Think of firewire as an AGP graphics card since it has its own onboard processor to help things along, and usb2 as onboard graphics which depends on the processor to work things out for it (same goes for onboard lan). Additionally, usb2 has more data overheads so this all translates into slower performance, GENERALLY.
There have been cases as documented by toms hardware in a hard drive round up where usb2 drives held their own and even beat fire drives in some tests. There are just so many variables to take into account with usb2. Fire is basically braindead - it just works.

Well, I managed to get one of the Cendyne externals for $29 but mine is only an ASUS.

Anybody found drivers to run this enclosure under Win98SE?

checking the specs on the box i see that only WINME, 2000, and XP are supported as usb 2.0 is only available in those OS.

i think it will run at 4x or 6x speed on win98 but not sure.
it will not be able to feed a dvd burner tho. since they require 1150k/sec which is too close to usb 1.1 top speed.

You might get lucky by downloading drivers from www.mapower.com.tw

Thanks, I'll try that tonight. That's where all my searches led me over the weekend, but I kept getting dns error when I tried to hit the URL. It seems to be responding now. I did find one SIIG driver for the Genesys Logic GL811USB chipset that allowed Win98 to see the drive and identify it, but any access attempt caused msgrv32 to stop responding. Hopefully the drivers from manpower will work better. Being able to use it will all of my machines will make it a lot more useful.

Where I can find this deal???

And does OfficeMax.com accept International cards??

Thank You