I was wondering if a standard SATA or IDE HDD can be used as an external HDD through one of those external hard disk enclosure? My brother is using a notebook HDD with the enclosure as an USB external drive, but is it possible with a desktop's SATA or IDE drive?
Depends on the enclosure. The smaller (2.5" ones) are meant only for notebook drives, the 3.5" ones are mostly meant for desktop IDE drives, but there are also SATA ones.
Most external enclosures have their own power supply. There are a few (2.5 enclosures) that are powered through the USB port. You just have to look around to find one that meets your requirements.
The smaller 2.5" enclosures are powered via the USB port. You can even buy them with a built-in Li-Ion battery and card reader. The larger 3.5" enclosures have their own power supply (via an AC/DC converter).
some actually has build in power supply. As long as the format of the drive matches the enclosure, you can get it to work.
Is it possible to remove the internal HDD,Load everything onto the external HDD,and run the rig with the external HDD only?
that's possible in theory but in practice sometimes it won't work. I think if your mobo has eSATA then it should work without any trouble but for usb it maybe slightly harder as not all system can boot from usb.
Even if it's possible, it's not advisable. USB or even eSATA isn't as fast as a proper SATA connection.
Is the USB transfer speed faster than SATA? If not, it would make no sense in using a SATA disk in the enclosure, it'll just slow down to the USB's speed (when connected to the computer through USB)... What is the transfer speed of IDE, SATA and USB?
nope, sata offers far better transfer speed than usb (1.5Gbit/s or 3.0Gbit/s for sata vs 400Mbit/s for usb 2.0). Adrian, actually benchmarks have shown that esata performs fairly close to sata. If you have a choice, I would suggest go for esata if you plan to boot off external storage, you probably have a better chance use esata.
Hmm.. That's probably because hard drives are still not fast enough to really benefit from the increased interface speeds. It really goes to show just how "important" interface speed is after a certain point. After all, there's little performance benefits in upgrading from 1.5Gbits/s SATA to 3Gbits/s SATA. But USB's transfer speed is really too low. Even if we assume 100% efficiency (which is impossible), it maxes out at 50MB/s, a transfer rate that many fast hard drives can beat (platter-to-buffer transfer rate).
yea.. USB is slower than SATA .. & if i'm not wrong, USB actually consumes more CPU resources compared to SATA
Only problem with esata is that there's not alot of systems MoBo/cases that support it yet. I've only seen on case that has native esata support and it was from Thermaltake.
i know there are combo drives which support eSATA like coolermaster & vantec getting the card for Esata will be expensive for laptops
Getting eSATA support on the external HDD enclosure is pretty easy. But getting eSATA support on the PC or notebook is a totally different story. For most PCs, you will still need to get an eSATA adaptor card, while notebooks will need a pretty expensive and rare eSATA expansion card too.
the nice thing about these esata enclosure is that most of them do come with usb or firewire, so they should be fine as you can use either esata or usb. For notebook it might be tougher as I am not sure there's even a esata notebook hd enclosure.
Ya though it's possible 2 find an eSata PCMCIA card,it's very tough to get an ExpressCard based eSata right now.
