External drive

A disk enclosure is a specialized casing designed to hold and power disk drives while providing a mechanism to allow them to communicate to one or more separate computers.

Drive enclosures provide power to the drives therein and convert the data sent across their native data bus into a format usable by an external connection on the computer to which it is connected. In some cases, the conversion is as trivial as carrying a signal between different connector types. In others, it is complicated enough to require a separate embedded system to retransmit data over connector and signal of a different standard.

Factory-assembled external hard disk drives, external DVD-ROM drives, and others consist of a storage device in a disk enclosures.

Key benefits to using external disk enclosures include:

In the consumer market, commonly used configurations of drive enclosures utilize magnetic hard drives or optical disc drives inside USB, FireWire, or Serial ATA enclosures. External 3.5-in floppy drives are also fairly common, following a trend to not integrate floppy drives into compact and laptop computers. Pre-built external drives are available through all major manufacturers of hard drives, as well as several third parties.

These may also be referred to as a caddy – a sheath, typically plastic or metallic, within which a hard disk drive can be placed and connected with the same type of adapters as a conventional motherboard and power supply would use. The exterior of the caddy typically has two female sockets, used for data transfer and power.

Variants of caddy:

Advantages:

Disadvantages:

A range of other form factors has emerged for mobile devices. While laptop hard drives are today generally of the 9.5 mm high variant of the "2.5-inch" drive form factor, older laptops and notebooks had hard drives that varied in height, which can make it difficult to find a well-fitting chassis. Laptop optical drives require "slim" 5.25-in enclosures, since they have approximately half the thickness of their desktop counterparts, and most models use a special 50-pin connector that differs from the 40-pin connectors used on desktop ATA drives.

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Wikipedia