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Rosewill IDE USB 2.0 external enclosure

Got this from newegg. It is the Rosewill RX35MV-U-BU SLV 3.5" IDE to USB 2.0 External Enclosure (Silver Aluminum & plastic). If you have an old hard disk drive (HDD) hanging about and it works and you want to convert it into external storage - give this a try.

Be aware that the design is iffy and the IDE connector pins that stick out from underneath the PCB may touch the aluminium case - I put two layers of duct tape strips to ensure isolation between the data pins/power and the case body per chance pressure on the case caused the aluminum body to short the power or data pins.

The standoffs between the drive and the enclosure are plastic, which doesn't make for such efficient heat conduction even though the body is aluminum.

The drive was easy and intuitive to assemble - took about 10 minutes. Vista has no problem recognizing and treating the enclosure as an external drive.

This is an IDE USB 2.0 device, IDE drives are going out of fashion now, being replaced by SATA

As a sample transfer speed I got a peak transfer rate of 18.9 MB/s (transferred 1.46 GB in about 2 min). The HDD was a Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600JB 160GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra ATA100.
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