My laptop is on its death bed and I have to buy a new one.
I have tons of data on my internal drive and I'll have to remove the drive, fit it on a caddy and then plug it into the new laptop.
What should I look for in a USB caddy? Prices vary from £4 to even £50. What's the difference? Can I just buy the cheapest one or is there anything that makes a difference?
USB3
Yes, but it will likely be noticeably slower if it isnt USB3
USB3
I have a cheap Bipro 2.5in USB3 caddy that was under £5. It houses a 1TB Toshiba 5400rpm spinning rust drive and is used to backup the SSD in a Linux computer.
Using rsync and USB3 the average transfer rate from SSD to spinning rust is between 90MB/sec and 125MB/sec. For a sub £5 caddy, that performance is acceptable.
Steer clear of any USB 2.0 ones, go for USB 3 at a minimum. UASP is a feature that makes for faster transfers but you don't absolutely need it, especially if it's just a one-time operation. Some chips are cheaper and nastier than others but they will all probably do the job (even the USB 2.0 ones, they'll just be slower).
Otherwise it's just a matter of robustness really. Some might also come with an external power supply, which you probably don't really need unless you're plugging into a router or something that can't provide enough power - a PC should be fine.
Theo
Search Amazon for "SATA to USB cable" Works fine for 2.5" drives.
This unit comes with its own power adapter. While good pictures of the power adapter are not available, the adapter should be 12V @ 2A. Inside the enclosure, is a 5V regulator. It takes some of the 12V input and makes 5V from it. The regulator should be able to source 1 ampere.
1 ampere is just enough to spin up a 2.5" rotating HDD.If you think the laptop is old enough to house a 2.5" IDE drive, then there are adapters which have both IDE and SATA on them. Again, the power supply provided with this is 12V @ 2A and that will spin up a modern 3.5" drive. The internal regulator inside the plastic housing, will provide 5V for usage with
2.5" drives (drives that run off only 5V).And while units like that promise "SuperSpeed", typically the chip is internally limited to 200-250MB/sec. While there are some better (second generation chips), they aren't really necessary, and if they're going to scam you with a 200MB/sec chip, it's really good enough for the job. I think all of mine are the inferior kind, and it does not affect my usage of them. Still good enough for cloning. Plenty fast enough.
Enclosures seldom provide decent cooling -- on the one with the plastic door DON'T close the lid :-)
I removed the housing from my (different brand) enclosure, and just use the adapter PCB board, all so that there would be some air circulation around the thing. Only some of the drives get stinking hot. Others run cool.
While I'm typing this, my 1TB WD Black 3.5" drive is using
5V @ 0.15A \___ 3.5 watts (measured with clamp-on meter) 12V @ 0.23A /That's why it runs cool when it is idle. Years ago, some of the hard drives had a 40W footprint and you could fit a three fan cooler to them :-) How times have changed. I have some other drives still in the house which draw 12-13W.
Paul
You can, if the laptop is still capable of functioning, transfer the files across the network.
I cant think of what apart from slower transfer speeds - might be wrong with a cheap caddy though
IME 2.5" SATA SSDs will derive enough power from a single USB2 port but
2.5" SATA HDDs may need to be powered from 2 x USB2 ports using a USB 'Y' cable. A USB hub will probably need external power. Again IME, SATA SSDs & HDDs will derive enough power from a single USB3 port.What interface, serial or the old sort? Can the drive be powered from the USB or does it need a psu as well. Other than that if its only a once only use, then I have used just a device that makes the interfaces the same and a psu. Brian
In message <tkebrv$3vu4o$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, at 19:49:19 on Tue, 8 Nov
2022, Ottavio Caruso snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com remarked:Having done this sort of thing a few times, I find that a dongle, rather than a caddy, is the quickest and easiest.
Most of the caddies I've seen are just such a dongle with a cheap plastic case clipped around it.
I have a couple of USB3 dongles (one USB-A and one USB-C) and they are very convenient. Mine will ONLY support 2.5" drives as they do not have a
12V supply. Mostly I connect them to SSDs which have a nice case already, so there is no need for a housing. I do also have a USB3 desktop caddy with a separate power supply which supports bare 3.5" and 2.5" drives. The drives drop into a letterbox slot in the top and stand upright. All my devices are from Startech. They are more expensive than some others, but their products generally "just work". JohnOp 09/11/2022 om 17:08 schreef Roland Perry:
How do you connect a dongle to a 500GB HDD?
Op 08/11/2022 om 21:20 schreef mm0fmf:
Can the USB power the drive without additional power?
How do you rsync and keep copies of the original files is they are deleted/modified?
Op 09/11/2022 om 10:18 schreef Brian Gaff:
It's this:
1) plug HDD into adapter e.g.
OTOH, I bought a couple of these:
Which seem to be quite satisfactory and also act as an enclosure for the drive, thus protrcting it a bit. Further, since it's permanently plugged in, there's no wear and tear on the connector at the drive end, which is prolly not designed for trillons of pluggings and unpluggings.
I also bought a dongle from the Pi store for an SSD, because that particular one had been recommended as working well with the Pi 4B. Which it does.
superglue
Both types have their uses, the dongle style are good for a quick hook-up, let you copy off the data from an old machine, stick the drive in a draw and probably never touch it again.
The caddy style if you want to re-use the old drive afterwards as some portable storage.
Try plugging it in?
When you say "dongle" do you mean a SATA-to-USB (or IDE-to-USB) interface, typically powered from its own wall-wart? A caddy is effectively one of those inside a metal/plastic case that protects the disc and its SATA and power connectors.
I bought a combined IDE/SATA-to-USB interface ages ago so I could read data from discs that I removed from non-booting PCs (having gone through the hassle of the long "take ownership" process when reading from the c:\users\<username> folder tree). For a disc that will only be connected for a short time, you don't need the extra mechanical protection of a caddy.
I had a minor panic the other day because I had to transfer some information off a very old Windows 95 (!!) PC (*), and I couldn't find my interface device. I could find another, SATA-only interface, but that's no use with an IDE disk. And I couldn't boot up that PC and copy the data from it to a USB pen drive because the PC was too old to have USB ports. I could have written to floppies, but a) I don't have any floppies to hand, and b) I don't have any other computer with a floppy drive. Technology becomes obsolete very quickly. I did find an old PC that had ribbon cables and rectangular connectors, but that turned out to be floppy interface rather than IDE interface. Eventually I found the missing SATA/IDE-to-USB interface in the one pocket that I had missed in my laptop bag.
(*) Yes, I know W95 is regarded as insecure these days. The person who owned the PC was well aware of that and never connected the PC to the internet and never transferred information/programs to it by floppy or CD. He got fed up of having to boot up that PC (with the attendant problem of date and time being wrong because the soldered-to-the-motherboard CMOS battery was dead) and asked me to retrieve the information to put onto his Windows 8 laptop.
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