[mdlug] USB burners
Raymond McLaughlin
driveray at ameritech.net
Thu Jul 24 17:50:46 EDT 2008
Robert Citek wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 7:20 AM, Ingles, Raymond
> <Raymond.Ingles at compuware.com> wrote:
>>> From: gib at juno.com
>>> Yup, my first burner was a HP Series 8200 CD burner. Worked
>>> like a champ. You just need good hardware, software and media.
>> ... It's a USB cable with a block on one end.
>> ...
>> It's not aesthetically pleasing, but you can hook up whatever drive
>> you want at that point...
>
> Here's a photo of an adapter in use:
>
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/rwcitek/2547578848/
Looking at the picture I see a 2.5" drive connected and what looks like
SATA connectors opposite it. I have to wonder, where would a 3.5" drive
connect? Mine is differently shaped, more square, with one type of
connector on each of three sides.
> Turns my Windows laptop into a multi-boot Linux laptop. And it also
> converts internal CD-ROM/DVD drives and burners to USB.
>
> Regards,
> - Robert
A couple words of caution though. First is that you want to make sure to
plug in the USB connector *LAST*, after connecting and powering up the
drive, and unplug the USB first. Also, if you are going to change
drives, disconnect the USB plug between drives. I really confused HAL
on my system by not doing so. These considerations might have been
covered in the instructions that came with it. Maybe I should have read
them before throwing them away. :)
Also the usefulness of these is somewhat limited in that diagnostics
such as smartctl, hdparm and sdparm don't seem to work as they would on
a regular IDE/SATA connection. It would be nice to be able to evaluate
the health of a drive without having to power cycle a system.
More information about the mdlug
mailing list