external enclosures

[tendercare]

hi, I plan to buy an external enclosure for a second hard disk.

I have an external enclosure for my cd-burner; it has its own power supply; I can turn it on or off whenever I want. But can I do the same with a hard disk?


thanks

 

[bweir]

Yes. I have one running an older 80Gb disk and you just turn it on or off like any other device. However, if you leave it on, and reboot Windows, you get an NTLDR error because WinXP tries to boot from it, so it needs to be off when you reboot or start the PC.

It also transfers data a lot slower due to the USB connector being a bottleneck, whereas an internal drive gets its own IDE or SATA channel right to the board.

 

[wun911]

I have an external HD Ive never dared turn the power off it untill my computer is totally shut down.

If I did turn off the power to the external HD while it was hooked up to my system and transfering files. Would the external HD be damaged in anyway?

I use eSATA to avoid the USB bottleneck and it works quite well it works just like any HD inside the comp plays games back up MP3s etc. And im pretty sure I have started up my comp with the external HD on and I have no problems with WinXP trying to boot up from it. I think it maybe just a BIOS thing. You can go to BIOS and select what HD you want to boot from and switch off the "seek boot from external devices" ect etc.

 

[Codesmith]

There is a safe remove feature in Windows that must be used before removing flash drives, digital camera's external storeage ....

Its in the system tray as a green arrows over a gray box.

When you click it, you can chose from a list of devices to disconnect. Select one and in a bit it will either tell you that you can now safely remove the device or you may get a error saying the device is in use.

If you don't safely remove anything with flash memory it will sometimes get corrupted and you will lose all you data and be forced to reformat.

Yank a hard drive and you won't lose the file system, but you will lose any data that was being written to the drive.

Sometimes windows goes nuts and will keep files locked even when they are not longer in use.

There is a program called unlocker which you can use to release the file. It comes in handy when you are using removeable storage.

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The CMOS setup determines what drives can be booted from and the order in which they will be tried. So if you don't want you system to boot from the USB HD before the internal hard drive change something in your CMOS setup.

Also some IDE to USB adapters will prevent your system from booting at all if they are plugged in, but powered off. Which is good to know.
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Personally I like IDE to USB 2.0/ SATA adapters. I have a extra long SATA cable comming out the back of my system.

I get full speed from SATA and 35 MBps from systems with only USB 2.0.