nsane.forums Posted April 29, 2013 Share Posted April 29, 2013 A couple years back I called the USB-to-IDE/SATA adapter the most indispensable tool in my PC repair kit. Just this weekend, it once again proved itself worthy of that title. In a nutshell, the adapter allows you to connect an internal hard drive to your PC—externally. What would an internal drive be doing outside your desktop or laptop? Funny you should ask. About a week ago, my media-center PC starting displaying this message during boot-up: "Hard drive failure imminent." And you know what? It was. In short order, the machine wouldn't boot at all. Long story short, I had to replace the drive, reinstall Windows, etc. But I wondered if I could salvage any/all of my recorded TV shows. To find out, I connected the old, non-booting drive (now "naked" outside the system) to a USB port via my adapter. Huzzah! The machine was able to read the drive and copy over the recordings. Except for the hassles (and expense) of actually replacing the drive, no harm done. There's another reason to keep one of these adapters on hand, and that's if you're planning to upgrade to a solid-state drive (SSD). Unless you buy a kit that comes with an adapter, you'll need one so you can image (i.e. clone) your existing drive to the new SSD. Then you'll remove the old drive, install the new one, and presto, you're back in business. (Much faster business: SSDs rock.) Unless you have a pretty old desktop or laptop, you can skip buying a USB-to-IDE/SATA adapter and just go for USB-to-SATA. At the same time, I recommend one that supports USB 3.0. You may not need it now, but it's a good bet your next PC will have USB 3.0 ports -- and that'll make for much faster copying between drives. There are lots of these kinds of adapters out there. One good bet is the Sabrent USB-DSC7, which TigerDirect currently has on sale for $24.99. It works with all SATA drive sizes and has very good user ratings. Trust me: When the time comes that you need to upgrade or replace a hard drive, you'll be glad to have a USB-to-SATA adapter on hand. View: Original Article Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VileTouch Posted April 30, 2013 Share Posted April 30, 2013 there's one problem though. S.M.A.R.T. info does not transfer over through usb, so IF that disk is having problems you will have no way of telling until you either connect it directly through IDE/SATA or it dies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MidnightDistortions Posted April 30, 2013 Share Posted April 30, 2013 there's one problem though. S.M.A.R.T. info does not transfer over through usb, so IF that disk is having problems you will have no way of telling until you either connect it directly through IDE/SATA or it dies.That's weird.. i thought there was an instance where that would work. I don't remember how or what i had connected, it could have been an external hard drive. These usb to sata/ide adapters are good for if you want to see if the drive works without having to mess with putting the drive into an enclosure/PC case. They can be useful too if you need to get data off a dead PCDefraggler reads S.M.A.R.T. data & i use crystaldiskinfo to monitor the drives health/temps. I have a hard drive that went bad but it seems to work ok now when i used SpinRite on it, but i don't use the drive all the time now. Heat now seems to cause the drive to go haywire. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nIGHT Posted May 2, 2013 Share Posted May 2, 2013 ....but could be handy! B) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dcs18 Posted May 2, 2013 Share Posted May 2, 2013 In a nutshell, the adapter allows you to connect an internal hard drive to your PC—externally.When I built my system, last year - I made a very conscious decision to purchase a gaming cabinet that would accommodate an Internal Disk out of the cabinet.In short, my cabinet has an inbuilt external slot where an eSATA disk upto 6 GB/s can be used just like an External Disk.What would an internal drive be doing outside your desktop or laptop?This arrangement is great for Professionals who need to recover their Customers' dead HDDs.However, the Internal Disks cannot be used continuously at this slot the way it is within the cabinet - for fear of HDD failure setting in, due to cooling issues.All having been said, for those who do not possess such a cabinet, these USB-to-IDE/SATA adapters are an excellent idea. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nIGHT Posted May 5, 2013 Share Posted May 5, 2013 In a nutshell, the adapter allows you to connect an internal hard drive to your PC—externally.When I built my system, last year - I made a very conscious decision to purchase a gaming cabinet that would accommodate an Internal Disk out of the cabinet.In short, my cabinet has an inbuilt external slot where an eSATA disk upto 6 GB/s can be used just like an External Disk.What would an internal drive be doing outside your desktop or laptop?This arrangement is great for Professionals who need to recover their Customers' dead HDDs.However, the Internal Disks cannot be used continuously at this slot the way it is within the cabinet - for fear of HDD failure setting in, due to cooling issues.All having been said, for those who do not possess such a cabinet, these USB-to-IDE/SATA adapters are an excellent idea.Can you post a link reference of your "gaming cabinet HD file storage" brand/model, I am curious to have one too,but I'm not good at hardware accessories stuff, need some info dcs18 and thanks! ;)I already have a small knowledge of RAID-0, RAID-1 and RAID-10, but seems too complicated to have it being handy to me to have, doing maintenance like dust cleaning is already a big tasks for me. haha! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dcs18 Posted May 5, 2013 Share Posted May 5, 2013 In a nutshell, the adapter allows you to connect an internal hard drive to your PC—externally.When I built my system, last year - I made a very conscious decision to purchase a gaming cabinet that would accommodate an Internal Disk out of the cabinet.In short, my cabinet has an inbuilt external slot where an eSATA disk upto 6 GB/s can be used just like an External Disk.Can you post a link reference of your "gaming cabinet HD file storage" brand/model, I am curious to have one too,but I'm not good at hardware accessories stuff, need some info dcs18 and thanks! ;)Here it - NZXT H2 Classic Silent Midtower Chassis Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VileTouch Posted May 5, 2013 Share Posted May 5, 2013 Defraggler reads S.M.A.R.T. data & i use crystaldiskinfo to monitor the drives health/temps. I have a hard drive that went bad but it seems to work ok now when i used SpinRite on it, but i don't use the drive all the time now. Heat now seems to cause the drive to go haywire.it "could" depend on the device's interface firmware, but the ones i've tried (a lot) don't even read the smart status and expose a static "healthy" status to the system. for disk monitors and bios to report. (or at least to avoid a kernel crash when it finds a nil value) this i discovered after dumping the hitachi lifestudio's firmware (long story) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nIGHT Posted May 5, 2013 Share Posted May 5, 2013 In a nutshell, the adapter allows you to connect an internal hard drive to your PC—externally.When I built my system, last year - I made a very conscious decision to purchase a gaming cabinet that would accommodate an Internal Disk out of the cabinet.In short, my cabinet has an inbuilt external slot where an eSATA disk upto 6 GB/s can be used just like an External Disk.Can you post a link reference of your "gaming cabinet HD file storage" brand/model, I am curious to have one too,but I'm not good at hardware accessories stuff, need some info dcs18 and thanks! ;)Here it - NZXT H2 Classic Silent Midtower Chassiswow! thanks dcs18! :D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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