There are a lot of products on the market these days which are nothing more than notebook hard drives in a USB enclosure. Does anybody know of a site which compiles the model names of these products and the kind of hard drive inside?
I've opened up some of these things and I was surprised to find PATA drives inside of them, instead of SATA drives. Thanks,
Most of the ones I've seen were PATA. Models reproduce quicker than back-stabs in an election year.
External USB and Firewire hard disks basically comprise of a case which contains a standard IDE (5400 rpm) or SATA (7400rpm) hard disk with a USB-to-IDE or SATA or Firewire-to-IDE or SATA interface adaptor. Hence, these units are susceptible to the usual problems related to IDE or SATA hard drives along with those that external case and interface bring. One of the common additional problems is that these drives have a tendency to get overheated. The reason behind this is the insufficient ventilation of external case. In fact, earlier hard drives did not consist of ventilation at all! Times have changed and technology has advanced since then. Nowadays modern devices contain a fan inside the case so as to combat the high temperature that builds up inside.
Therefore a proper extractor fan and a good quality HDD (we only supply Hitachi-IBMs to avoid clients coming back to us, so this should tell you something) with capacity not exceeding 320Gb( as anything above that mark, are frankly not tested properly and manufacturers are testing their products in the market rather than in their labs.
There is an inteersting article published on our website, feel free to download it.