On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 12:49:30PM -0600, William Robb scripsit: > ----- Original Message ----- From: "paul stenquist" > Subject: OT: Hard drive enclosures? >> My oldest external drive failed. It's close to 10 years old and is only >> about 130 meg. It was fully backed up, so it's not a problem. It's a >> 3.5 SATA drive in an enclosure. I'm wondering if I can use that >> enclosure for any SATA 3.5 drive. I'm going to replace it with a 1.5 >> terabyte Seagate 7200 rpm 3.5 SATA. Are all enclosures created equal? >> >> BTW, amazon currently has that Seagate drive for $114 with free shipping. > > You should be able to just drop a new drive in and keep playing. > I think bigger drives produce more heat, so if the enclosure doesn't have > a cooling fan, the new drive might have a rather short life.
I'm reading Paul's description as the *drive* is nigh 10 years old, and the enclosure is newer. (I certainly don't remember SATA external enclosures being available in 1999 or 2000.) If that is the case, *and* if the enclosure is one of the solid hunk of aluminium extrusion ones, terabyte drives won't be a problem; the enclosure gets warm but that's _why_ it's a solid hunk of aluminium extrusion. If the enclosure is the bulky, air-gap kind, yes, you should probably make sure it has some kind of cooling fan. The other possible issue is the SATA standard supported by the enclosure and its various generational permutations; a very first generation SATA enclosure will work, but it'll be a good deal slower in terms of read/write throughput than a new terabyte range drive itself is capable of being. That might not matter for one component of a backup. The thing I will note is that terabyte range drives are not particularly robust; I wouldn't plan on getting nigh 10 years out of it. -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
