[mdlug] USB burners

[Raymond McLaughlin]

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

>> 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.

KDE on SUSE provides a little "My Computer" that I keep on a task bar 
for one thing only, a quick, point and click way to  "safely remove" 
removable media. Since I also make use of encrypted loop back 
filesystems on some such devices, I often end up managing these things 
from the command line. I make it a point to execute sync before umount. 
At the command line I don't bother with "eject" per se.

>> 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.

Not terribly important, it would provide one more potential use of the 
device.

>  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.

Ah! You got the one with out the power brick. This explains why yours is 
so narrow. Mine came with a "power brick", and a switch dongle that 
provides a molex connector to power a 3.5" HD, and a floppy drive type 
power connector that plugs into the drive connector block. This can 
provide power for either types of 2.5" drive. Alternatively the power 
can be pulled from the USB for all but 3.5" drives. My connector block 
is wider than yours because the SATA side connects to both the power and 
the data. I think I paid a little more for mine (~$30), but I'm glad I did.

Raymond McLaughlin

> Regards,
> - Robert