[mdlug] USB burners

[Robert Citek]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 2:50 PM, Raymond McLaughlin
<driveray at ameritech.net> wrote:
> Robert Citek wrote:
>> 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.

I created some more notes on the image.  The 2.5" laptop PATA
connection is at 3'o'clock.  The SATA is at noon.  And the 3.5" PATA
connection is a 9'o'clock.

>> 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. :)

Yes.  Two more itemes:

1) unmount/eject before disconnecting.
2) one device per adapter.  You can't connect two drives to one unit.
(That's what I've been told.  I haven't actually tried it for fear of
liberating the magic smoke.)

> 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.

True, if that's important to you.  For me, it's not.  It's backed up
fairly regularly so if it does bite the dust, I swap in a new drive.
And laptop drives are getting cheap:

http://www.pricewatch.com/notebook_hard_drives/250gb.htm

I'd use SATA laptop drives, but haven't figured out how to power them.
 Searching for "USB to SATA power" hasn't yielded what I'm looking
for.

Regards,
- Robert