I've had a 320GB drive sitting on my desk for a few weeks, waiting for me to work out how to get it into my Windows box, which currently contains one (1) failed disk and hence one (1) spare SATA port... but not where I can get at them easily. And I have a 600GB spanned volume in there, and I don't want to find out what happens if I get the cables mixed up.

Meanwhile, μTorrent has been torrenting away; iTunes has been sucking up podcasts; I have some new and not-exactly-small VMWare systems to run; I have a bunch of DVDs to DVDshrink; and of course there's the ever-growing collection of stuff.

I needed that drive.

So I got one of these.

It is what it says, as far as I can see. It takes either IDE or SATA drives (it has both connectors on its circuit board, and fiddly little cables), and connects to your PC via either USB or eSATA. 480Mbps today; 1.5Gbps tomorrow!

I popped it open, attached the drive to the circuit board with the screws provided*, slid it back in... pulled it out, tucked the SATA cable down so that it didn't get trapped, slid it back in successfully this time, plugged it in, and turned it on.

Storage manager found it, and it's formatting away.

It also has a three-port USB hub; haven't tried that yet, but I will.

So, plusses: It works; it's reasonably inexpensive; it takes SATA drives so that you can take them out at a later date and put them in a machine; eSATA option; USB hub. Not especially ugly. Power and backup buttons. Backup software.

Minuses: Those darn blue LEDs are pretty bright; I've tucked it away behind my monitor so I don't have to look at it. No fan.

Overall, I'd rate this a crackers... oops, too much Anime Pulse... a doesn't suck much. And I'm good for disk space for the next three months.

Now all I need to do is swap out my buggered CD burner (which is stuck closed with my Hordes of the Underdark CD in it) for my new 16x DVD burner. And then! Then I will have a somewhat slow and elderly but reasonably capable PC with too many drives attached to it.

* Which, being very flat, make good replacements for the lost screws from my 4-drive SATA backplane. The external case has enough clearance for normal screws; the backplane doesn't, but as I said, I lost the screws.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:22 PM | Comments (518) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)