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External Usb drive

paulgul
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Registered: ‎05-04-2007

External Usb drive

Has anyone ever took one of these apart, I assume they contain a standard drive but is it hard wired or are the connections just plugged in as an internal drive? My reason for asking, I have 2 of them at the moment but was thinking of buying a esata drive docking station and was wondering if I could use the drives from the usb devices with the resulting increase in transfer speed.
Any thoughts?
Paul
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HPsauce
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Re: External Usb drive

They vary, and the drives may be IDE or SATA, but generally the ones I've taken apart deliver a fairly standard drive.
However, not all are formatted in a standard way so once dismantled the existing data may be inaccessible and you may need to reformat (NTFS or FAT32 probably) to reuse.
paulgul
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Re: External Usb drive

Ahh, I hadn't thought about formatting, just assumed they would be readable. I suspect they may be sata drives, both fairly new 1TB drives.
ReedRichards
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Re: External Usb drive

They all use standard hard drives and as standard hard drives are made for plug-in connections, there is no hard wiring.  Non-standard formatting is news to me, perhaps HPsauce will elucidate? 
HPsauce
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Re: External Usb drive

I've seen many external drives recently that use proprietary formats driven by the specific manufacturers software and backup utilities.
Can't recall the last brand, but it was one of the big names. No hope of getting data off once the interface electronics and software were removed without using expert technical knowledge; certainly not a windows-recognised format.
paulgul
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Re: External Usb drive

In my case both external drives are for backups so I won't worry about re-formating and creating new backups
VileReynard
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Re: External Usb drive

My NAS drive allowed me to use FAT32, NTFS or ext3
So it's ext3 Grin

"In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was Aardvark."

HPsauce
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Re: External Usb drive

Quote from: A
ext3

Which, as I'm sure amuses you immensely, Windows does not recognise without added drivers.  Roll_eyes
It could well be that the external drives I described as "proprietary" were using such a format, but as they were sold mainly for use on Windows systems that is maybe not 100% sensible.
VileReynard
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Re: External Usb drive

Works fine.
Windows or Linux.
If it fails, it's likely to be the hard disk - in which case I can just throw the disk away.

"In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was Aardvark."