After making several trips into downtown Olongapo City, I found that I could not buy an external hard drive enclosure locally. Even the places that could order one, could only order the kind for SATA hard drives. I'm starting to think external hard drive enclosures for IDE hard disk drives are no longer being made. What the retailers had in stock were the kind of external hard drive units I don't want, with hard drives already in them.
An IDE/SATA USB 2.0 Adapter
After looking at hundreds of hard drive enclosures online, and finding very few for IDE hard drives, I almost ordered the Vantec Universal Storage Adapter for SATA and IDE to USB 2.0. That was before I realized there isn't an enclosure involved.
As careful as I am with my computer equipment, dust and humidity are the primary enemies of electronics in the Philippines. My hard drive needs an enclosure to protect it from those elements.
A Hard Drive Enclosure
Despite being difficult to find, I can still find IDE to USB hard drive enclosures online and that's what I intend to do. I'll order one and have it shipped to my wife, who's currently in the US. She'll be shipping a balikbayan box (a box a little bigger than what you can take on an airplane) within the next month or so anyway. The box will arrive here a few months before she returns.
I'm going to become an external hard drive enclosure collector, for all kinds of hard drives. I may still buy the adapter I mentioned because it works with all kinds of drives and flash cards, but only for temporary use. At around USD $30.00, it's not a major purchase that's going to set me back. The hard drive enclosures, on the other hand, are even cheaper at $10 to $20 each.
With USB 2.0 ports available on almost everything electronic now, and with USB 3.0 in the works, it makes sense to have everything I can geared to work with them. I can't have enough hard disk drive (or solid state drive for that matter) enclosures in my possession. It beats the heck out of opening and closing computer cases and fiddling with internals.
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- External Hard Disk Drives and what they're used for
- My External USB Hard Drive Died
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