Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A note on Python's __exit__() and errors

Python's context managers are a very neat way of handling code that needs a teardown once you are done. Python objects have do have a destructor method ( __del__ ) called right before the last instance of the object is about to be destroyed. You can do a teardown there. However there is a lot of fine print to the __del__ method. A cleaner way of doing tear-downs is through Python's context manager , manifested as the with keyword. class CrushMe: def __init__(self): self.f = open('test.txt', 'w') def foo(self, a, b): self.f.write(str(a - b)) def __enter__(self): return self def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb): self.f.close() return True with CrushMe() as c: c.foo(2, 3) One thing that is important, and that got me just now, is error handling. I made the mistake of ignoring all those 'junk' arguments ( exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb ). I just skimmed the docs and what popped out is that you need to return True or...
Post a Comment
Read more

Store numpy arrays in sqlite

Use numpy.getbuffer (or sqlite3.Binary ) in combination with numpy.frombuffer to lug numpy data in and out of the sqlite3 database: import sqlite3, numpy r1d = numpy.random.randn(10) con = sqlite3.connect(':memory:') con.execute("CREATE TABLE eye(id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, desc TEXT, data BLOB)") con.execute("INSERT INTO eye(desc,data) VALUES(?,?)", ("1d", sqlite3.Binary(r1d))) con.execute("INSERT INTO eye(desc,data) VALUES(?,?)", ("1d", numpy.getbuffer(r1d))) res = con.execute("SELECT * FROM eye").fetchall() con.close() #res -> #[(1, u'1d', <read-write buffer ptr 0x10371b220, size 80 at 0x10371b1e0>), # (2, u'1d', <read-write buffer ptr 0x10371b190, size 80 at 0x10371b150>)] print r1d - numpy.frombuffer(res[0][2]) #->[ 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0.] print r1d - numpy.frombuffer(res[1][2]) #->[ 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0.] Note that for work where data ty...
Post a Comment
Read more