2.5" Hard Drive Caddy

Hey guys,

My girlfriend’s laptop bit the dust a while ago. The screen's backlight broke and the laptop is a make I have never come across before to be able to get it fixed anywhere! (IPC?!). Anyways, I built her a new computer to replace it so all is good there now

I was thinking of turning the 30GB 2.5" laptop hard drive into a nice little portable storage device and was wondering if you guys could recommend any good little 2.5" caddy’s? Also, is it true that the 2.5" caddies don't need a separate power cable; they get their power straight from the computer?

Regards,

Chris :mac:

There are tons of these things out there, and they're all about the same. I bought this one from Computer Geeks and it does the job.

You need to be careful about the power issue: many of these enclosures will work fine when connected to a desktop Mac/PC, but the USB ports on some of the notebooks (iBook, etc) do not provide enough juice to power up the enclosure.

What kind of machine do you want to connect this to?

All kinds of machines really, I have a part time job as an IT support guy for a student housing company and so want the drive to be able to connect to clients computers for whatever reason.

Thanks for the info,

Regards,

Chris :mac:

got an adaptec one for a 2.5" 80G one from an HP pavilion laptop that melted itself. works like a charm.

came with a cable that has a "double" end - two usb connections, so if one doesn't power the drive enough to use, you can connect the other as well. works just fone on my macbook with one connection.

also, if the old laptop ran windows, you may have to reformat the drive if you want to erase or modify the files on the hard drive from a mac.
if it is/was formatted as ntfs (probably so if the laptop ran xp), this will be the case. if so, you can copy any data you want to save to another laptop/pc/etc then reformat in fat32 (which will give you the most accessability options as pretty much all OSs will read this file system). You can do this from a mac or a pc with either's standard disk management tool.