[mdlug] USB burners

[Raymond McLaughlin]

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.