Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sony Viao Vista and Gentoo

[Stroller <stroller@stellar.eclipse.co.uk>]

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On 20 Jul 2007, at 13:04, Albert Hopkins wrote:
>> ...
>> Enclosures are great when you want to keep a drive in there. But in
>> the case that you want to - say - pull the hard-drive out of your
>> laptop and plug it into a desktop PC for just a few minutes these
>> "adaptor cables" are very useful indeed. The link above prices them
>> at $17 - a price at which, IMO, you can't go wrong.
>
> Sorry I was under the impression he was using a dedicated drive for  
> the
> purpose.  I have a drive/enclosure that I lug around from machine to
> machine.  Though, if it were me, I'd still get an enclosure if just to
> have that future capability.

I don't know about this particular case.

I originally replied off-list because there was some Windows stuff I  
mentioned in my message that I felt to be off-topic & inappropriate  
for the list. The link that I gave was simply to say "get one of  
these, and backup, whatever you do".

I personally find this kind of dongly external adaptor to be more  
useful for temporary & ad-hoc use. In my house an external case will  
very quickly find a spare drive shoved in it and I'll fill it with  
"archive and backup" material. When I'm working on installation of a  
new machine & dd'ing partitions around I'd rather leave no room for  
error and not have a drive with that kind of stuff on it connected to  
the machine.

Additionally, in my experience, external drive enclosures are  
designed to take either an 2.5" or 3.5", EIDE or SATA drive, but not  
all kinds. The product I linked to is very versatile and will  
accommodate any of these drive types that I happen to have lying  
around, happen to be able to pull from my playstation or happen to  
need to work on. I fix PCs for a living and this is in my bag always  
- I'm sure it's used on average as often as once per week or ten  
days. I haven't experienced the problems Neil Bothwick describes -  
maybe mine is from a different batch or factory - although I have  
(not recently) had it decline to work with some (older?) 3.5" EIDE  
drives.

YMMV, horses for courses & it may depend how often you need to use it.

Stroller.

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