External SATA Drive - HDD Case

Had quite a scare this morning when my 300GB Maxtor One Touch II ceased being recognised as a drive in XP . Thank goodness it was only the USB ports on my USB hub playing up. A quick shuffle amongst ports and all is fine now . Nonetheless it has jolted me into getting my backup system into place.

In addition to the Maxtor I have a 3.5" 300GB Seagate SATA drive that's been gathering dust. I'm looking for a HDD case to pack the drive into. Is there anything specific to the SATA hard drives that they need a special case? Looking on ebay there are cases that say they are specifically for SATA drives. Does this mean a SATA drive can't be packaged into an IDE case? Apart from cooling and rugged construction is there anything else I should be looking for in a case to be used on a XP machine?

Thanks all.

A IDE/ATA case simply would not connct to the SATA drive...
There are SATA to ATA converters.. but these would make it impossible for the SATA drive to physically fit in the external case.

External SATA drives usually use the existing SATA cable as the interface.. no USB conversion required.

that said,. here is what NewEgg has to offer for SATA drives.
SATA Drive Cases

Cheers CDS.

So is it correct in saying that any of those cases on newegg will be suitable for plugging the drive into my machine via USB (given the supplied cable)? i.e. I'm not restricted to just the last case in the list which states "SATA to USB 2.0?

Sorry, Nation. Only those enclosures marked with external USB interface will work with USB. I believe that is only the last two. The others require an SATA interface.
I believe that they provide the cables, so if you have an SATA card or motherboard then you can connect to it.
It is never as easy as it looks

Skip Souza wrote:
It is never as easy as it looks

Tell me about it. Been googling for a while and still can't find anything. At least now I'm getting somewhere. Thanks for the info.