Modding external IDE drives?

i was sitting school and i started wondering if it was possible to make/buy a connecter that allows internal IDE drive to be located externally of the case?

 

you could take a normal ribbon cable, mount it to the front/top/whatever side of your case and glue pins into it. then you'd have an extension header.

 

Just of intrest, why would you want to do that?

 

yes, you can buy external enclosures for IDE (and SCSI) drives. They usually connect via the USB or parallel ports. Obviously, you're going to lose some performance, since neither of these methods have the kind of bandwidth IDE does, but they do work. This sort of thing is often used to attach an external CD-ROM or writer to a craptop. Mind you, firewire (and possibly USB 2.0) show some promise.

have a look at this for some ideas.

External SCSI enclosures usually use a spare port on the backplane of (most) SCSI controller cards, just for completeness.

 

Sure it could be done, like instant rice said, just run a molex and an IDE cable to the outside. But wouldn't you have turn off the machine and boot it back up with the device connected for it to be recognized? (I could be...and probably am...wrong about that.) They have external enclosures that can turn an internal cd-rom into an exteranl drive, which connects via usb. That way you could plug it in at anytime.

 

make a hole and bring a 0.9m round cables and a molex connecter through it

 

There are two issues:

1. Length. Yes, I know there are rounded IDE cables that exceeed the "maximum" length of an IDE cable, but we're talking about external. I have an external HD myself (USB2/Firewire...yum!), and if I were to run an IDE cable all the way from the drive to the IDE port, it'd probably be about 6 feet.

2. Interference. IDE is an internal-only interface for a reason: it wasn't designed to cope with external interference like SCSI or USB.

Panda: the latest revs of SCSI and USB both spank the **** out of IDE's bandwidth.

And as Dev hit upon, IDE is NOT hot-swappable, one of the main selling points of external drives.

 

Yes, since IDE is not inherantly hot-swappable, you would need to make sure you only connect or disconnect drives while the PC is powered down, if you were just extending the IDE cable. Also, remember that there are timing issues with IDE, which impact on how long the cable can be. There are ways of making IDE hot-swappable (i.e. you can 'power down' a drive, then disconnect it without turning off the PC - think PCMCIA), but they're not simple. You sometimes get this sort of thing on high-end IDE RAID controllers. Generally, it's better to leave IDE as not hot-swappable - if you really need this, go SCSI.

 

Heh, see what happens when too many people are reading (and replying to) the same thread at the same time...

Actually, if you read back, I didn't say anything about SCSI performance vs. IDE performance. Needless to say, SCSI tends to have higher ratings than IDE, which would be why it costs more. USB2.0 CAN perform better than IDE (see the rider in my first post) - it's not a given that it will. SCSI wasn't actually designed to deal with huge amounts of interference, IIRC - that was something that was added in later on. Interferance isn't that much of an issue (assuming you don't live in an industrial environment), since it is possible to compensate for it.

 

im only asking cause my case is cramped at the moment, the 5 and a quarter bays barly clear the memory bays and the round cables(0.45m) take up most of the space in the case(ill gbet some pics as soon as i can).

I also dont have the kind of money to buy SCSI and i dont really like usb quite as much as i should(its a long story), it sounds like a good mod idea as well.