Yes this is good, except
when as Karl said the USB interface is built into the hard drive
and not the case.....
Bob
Money can't buy happiness--- But somehow
it's more comfortable to cry in a Porsche than a Kia.
On 10/14/2011 10:19 AM, Gregory wrote:
I have saved several laptop HDD that way. Pull them out,
buy a USB case and now instant mini drives.
Gregory
Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2011 11:56 PM
Subject: Re: external hard drives
Sounds a
serious issue. Perhaps the best way forward will be to buy
bare drives and install them into a suitable case. I
upgraded my old macbook last summer and stuck a 500 GB drive
in it. The old 160 GB drive has made a splendid little
portable unit!
Howard
On 14 October 2011 03:36, Karl
Shah-Jenner <shahjen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Just aheads up for those using
external hard drives - I've been asked to recover a
small western digital passport hard drive and the
prospects aren't looking good.
Normally I find a standard drive inside with a USB or
firewire interface card attached, and the problem often
lies with this interface card - removing the drive and
popping it directly into a computer I can get on with
recovering data and all's good.. Having standard drives
inside external cases can be good too in that price
specials come up that mean it can be cheaper to buy an
external drive, pry it from its case and using it inside
a PC or laptop to upgrade or add a drive to the computer
for less cost than buying a bare drive.
However, once I pried open the case to reveal the actual
hard drive I discovered the internal drive uses an
integral usb interface and not a standard sata/pata
interface. This is not cool - not at all. Apparently
Samsung has also been doing this too so it looks like a
future trend driven by cost savings at the point of
manufacture.
The problem is that while the drive appears to be fine
and makes all the right noises on startup, the computer
doesn't see the drive at all - which suggests the usb
interface has failed.
So as the only way to easily talk to it is through the
now non functional USB and that option is gone, the next
way will be by swapping the hard drives board -
something that rarely had to be done with conventional
drives and means sacrificing a new drive at least once
to recover the data on the old drive - or by butching
the drive board to try to pull the serial data off from
some point.. which will not be easy - and even then the
data is likely to be encrypted (according to http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/215681/selfencrypted_drives_set_to_become_standard_fare.html
)
Here's some pics I found of what this interface looks
like:
http://i52.tinypic.com/ifsi9e.jpg
http://www.hdd-donor.com/pics/1290113551.jpg
Anyway this is just a warning that some newer external
drives, while conveniently small and cheap (cough..
that's the new benchmark for everything these days,
right?) may be a bit of a time bomb regarding
preservation of data.
My advice is research any drives before you buy and find
out whether they contain conventional style drives, and
avoid these new ones like the plague
regards
k
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