External USB -> SATA Interface

July 10, 2006 @ 9:40 pm

I’ve been shuttling back and forth with drives recently as I’m installing and reinstalling OS’s over the last couple of months. Upgrading is always a pain in the ass and one of the biggest pain points – at least with laptops – is that most of ‘em only support a single drive in the system. So in order to upgrade an OS the procedure usually is:

Attempt to make a complete backup

Remove the drive, plug in the new one

Install the new OS

Load up the data from the backup

Realize that I fucked up and didn’t backup everything

Plug the old drive back in, grab some more files

Repeat at will… <g>

Installing a new OS is enough of a hassle without having to worry about a complete backup. It sounds simple, but even if you remember EVERYTHING there always tends to be one or two files that are locked on the source system that didn’t back or is otherwise not showing up correctly.

Anyway, nowadays there are better ways to deal with this with cable solutions that allow you to externally plug your hard drive into an USB port. I just got one of these from here:

usb sata ide adapter for hard drives and optical drives with back up button

http://cooldrives.stores.yahoo.net/saandidehadr1.html

and it works great. The CoolDrives interface comes with both SATA and standard IDE interface and options for powered access or powered directly through USB.

I didn’t have much luck getting it work without external power – apparently my USB hub in the laptop doesn’t have enough juice to power the drive fully. Although it spun up, Vista wasn’t able to see the drive. Once I plugged it into the power supply and used the ‘powered USB’ adapter the drive popped right up. What’s even nicer is that with SATA drives you can actually hot connect the drive, so this is an easy way to hook up a new drive. Heck, it’s cheaper to buy a bare drive than an external USB with enclosure…

I got this a few weeks back when I needed some more data of my old drive, but this thing has come in damn handy a few times already when a hard drive of a friend of mine machines bombed out. Just being able to quickly plug the drive and hook it up to my system I was able to fix the drive and get it back running from a non-booting system.

I wish I would have looked into this a lot sooner. It sure would have saved me a ton of time for the many updates I went through last year

Well worth the $30 something bucks. Less if you only go the SATA or IDE route…

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re: External USB -> SATA Interface
by Vad July 11, 2006 @ 7:00 am

Good one

re: External USB -> SATA Interface
by Donnie Hale July 11, 2006 @ 11:35 am

I upgraded my laptop hard drive using Norton's Ghost. I created an image of my current drive onto an external USB drive. After I installed the new drive, I booted from the Ghost CD. Ghost could see the external USB drive, and I restored the image onto the new drive. I'm running on that drive now, and I haven't had a single problem after using that technique.

I've said it many times - Ghost, or one of its counterparts (I used to use Drive Image) is ***the best way*** to back up a system drive/partition.

FWIW...

Donnie

re: External USB -> SATA Interface
by yaip July 11, 2006 @ 1:42 pm

I have a laptop and I always shuddered at the though of "migrating". Now I can rest in peace.

Thanks Rick.

re: External USB -> SATA Interface
by Rick Strahl July 11, 2006 @ 2:12 pm

Donnie, Ghost and True Image etc. are fine, but I've always had some issues with them not catching everything. TI at least didn't run without Windows active so there's always stuff that's open and you end up with a few files that didn't save properly. You also need a second or third drive big enough to hold all the backed up data since it's not likely to fit on a DVD...

re: External USB -> SATA Interface
by Bertrand Le Roy July 11, 2006 @ 3:03 pm

I've been looking for exactly that. Now I know this one works. Thanks, Rick.

re: External USB -> SATA Interface
by Abdu July 11, 2006 @ 8:23 pm

Good hard drive partitioning makes backups easier.

Here's a good example:

c: OS only and size doesn't exceed 5G so it can fit into a single DVD. I never install programs here to keep size at minimum.

d: programs get installed here

e: data and my code here. This can also include the location for temp and tmp environment variables. This is very important to backup or image on a daily basis. Let the backup's scheduler take care of this.

Now if my system crashes or can't reboot, I restore the c drive. If I lost some data, I restore e: and so on.

Keeping OS, programs and data seperates makes backups painless. TrueImage also comes with a file explorer option where I can selectively restore files.

However now that huge external drives are inexpensive, I have a couple where I dump my images on.

Abdu

New Vista Install Take 2 - Rick Strahl
by Rick Strahl October 06, 2006 @ 4:21 am

I just installed a new build of Vista for a few improvements that I really needed and I'm impressed by the progress since Beta 2. Beta 2 was OK, but this build feels very solid and gasp - it's pretty damn snappy. It's making this computer work the way I thought it would when I bought it...