A look on the external hard drive enclosures
The external hard drive enclosures differ quite radically from classic enclosure systems such as a mobile rack. The difference is most obvious if you observe how the two types of enclosure actually connect. A mobile rack is using the IDE cable or the SCSI cable, while the external hard drive enclosures usually connect through the USB or Firewire port. The differences stated above might not seem much, but what they imply is quite amazing. The external hard drives can be treated as plug and play devices. This was an utopia only a few years ago. Just the thought of pulling out a hard drive while the system was still running seemed outrageous. But this is not all. Most of the external hard drives now in use also have much better transfer rates. The reason is rather obvious. The IDE technology in use for internal hard drives uses a rather outdated standard. The Universal Serial Bus and more recently the Firewire standards are much more adaptable and much more faster. They simply take the glamour of the hard disk and transform in just another plug and play device. Sometimes ignorance can be a very good weapon. The only serious drawback that external hard drives have is that they require your computer to have an USB or a Firewire port. Also the total price for such an item is considerably larger than for classic internal hard drives. Now let's take a look at the different aspect that external hard drive enclosures bring in. You see these enclosures allow you to use either a 2.5 inch hard drive (those made for notebooks) or a 3.5 inch hard drive (those made for PCs). This will allow you an unprecedented way of exchanging data between a PC and a laptop as most likely both have an USB or Firewire port. I know that there are also external hard drives using the parallel port but I recommend that you stick with the USB or Firewire, unless you have an old computer which doesn't have either of the USB and Firewire ports. As a conclusion I must say that external hard drive enclosures are a worthy investment and should definitely be on your shopping list the next time you have some spare cash
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