From: Stuart F. Biggar (Stuart.Biggar_at_opt-sci.arizona.edu)
Date: Sun Sep 15 2002 - 12:58:51 EDT
At 05:17 PM 9/14/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>I did a little experimenting and found that the 8Gb
>hard drive from the Travelstar E external housing can
>be removed and put into an external USB hard drive
>adapter. That's handy and more rugged, no short cable
>or fragile PCMCIA card to deal with if you have USB. I
>got a generic external housing from ebay for about
>$35.00 although Frys sells them too. The drive is a
>rather tight fit and the case won't quite close all
>the way on mine because there is a dip molded into the
>top of the cover. It would probably fit all the way on
>if the dip was filed off on the inside. The backup
>software on the hard drive is still accessable but I
>didn't try it to see if it would work over the USB
>connection or not.
Another, faster transfer rate, solution is one of
the similar boxes that holds a 2.5" drive and has
a Firewire to IDE converter. You need a Firewire
adapter (I use the IBM Cardbus one - it does not
interfere with other cards unlike some) for your
Thinkpad. I use the same adapter to connect a
DVD-R drive (Pioneer) for burning DVD-R. I have
used an older 30 GB Travelstar in the Firewire box
as temporary storage for burning - works fine.
The box provides power to the hard drive when
plugged into a PCI Firewire card. However, the
two Cardbus Firewire cards I have don't seem to
provide sufficient power to run the Travelstar.
The box has a regulator and a 9V (I think that is
what it is - it is at work) input. I bought
an appropriate wall wart at Radio Shack.
AFIK the interface rate for firewire can be 400
Mbits/sec and the interface chips are smarter
than USB (including USB 2) so the overhead is
smaller with Firewire. The limiting device
is probably the hard disk or DVD in the case of
firewire. With USB 1.X the limiting factor is
probably USB itself.
Stuart
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