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NDBounce · Oct 28, 2007, 04:27 PM

I have seen a lot of small portable external USB 2.0 Hard Drives at many retail outlets. I am wondering if anyone knows is the drive in these machines is the same as the drive in a Powerbook (i.e. same connections). Basically, I want to upgrade my Powerbook hard drive, and I see these are often less expensive. I am wondering if I can buy something like this
Hitachi - 160GB External Hard Drive - H2160U

And then disassemble it, put that drive into my Powerbook, and then put my old Powerbook Drive in to the casing and use it as an external storage device.

I cannot find any information if the actual drive inside these is a 2.5" ATA drive or not. Can someone here confirm whether or not I will be able to do this?

Thank you,

O
B unce!

mduell · Oct 28, 2007, 05:08 PM

It's the same size, but it may be a different interface (SATA instead of ATA/IDE) and there's no way to know (I can't even make a convincing guess).

But you can get a 160GB drive for your PowerBook for $90, so why bother paying $20 more to rip an external apart?

peeb · Oct 28, 2007, 05:30 PM

ifixit.com has a lot of great info on this.

NDBounce · Oct 28, 2007, 06:31 PM

The reason to pay the $20 would be to get the case that I could use to put my old drive into.

CharlesS · Oct 28, 2007, 06:37 PM

Thing is, you can get USB 2.0 enclosures on Newegg for $20. They're not the greatest, but then neither are the ones in the pre-built drives (IMO). And this way you can know what drive you're getting, and get the full warranty on it.

If you want FireWire, of course, it gets a lot more expensive than that. USB 2.0 is cheap, though.

ghporter · Oct 28, 2007, 08:15 PM

I just bought a Coolmax combination USB 2.0/Firewire enclosure for about $35 from Directron. I haven't had the chance to put the drive in it, and it's a 5 1/4" enclosure I got for putting an optical drive in. But for $35 that ain't bad at all.

mduell · Oct 28, 2007, 08:17 PM

Originally Posted by NDBounce

The reason to pay the $20 would be to get the case that I could use to put my old drive into.

The pre-built drives rarely go back together as well as they came apart, and you can get a decent enclosure for $6. For $25 you could even have a USB2+FW400 enclosure.

CharlesS · Oct 28, 2007, 08:19 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

I just bought a Coolmax combination USB 2.0/Firewire enclosure for about $35 from Directron. I haven't had the chance to put the drive in it, and it's a 5 1/4" enclosure I got for putting an optical drive in. But for $35 that ain't bad at all.

What chipset does it use for the FireWire?

outthere · Oct 29, 2007, 01:56 AM

guys,
another newbie's question-
is this compatible with mac?
or it doesn't matter since it's an external harddrive.
thank you very much.

peeb · Oct 29, 2007, 02:38 AM

Yes, any drive with a USB or Firewire connection will work - you will have to format it first.

ghporter · Oct 29, 2007, 08:07 AM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

What chipset does it use for the FireWire?

Good question. I've only opened the box to just make sure everything was there. I'll try to take a look at it later today and see what's in it.

outthere · Oct 29, 2007, 12:00 PM

Originally Posted by peeb

Yes, any drive with a USB or Firewire connection will work - you will have to format it first.

thanks.

ghporter · Oct 29, 2007, 08:04 PM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

What chipset does it use for the FireWire?

So here I am inside my so far unused enclosure. I've taken the board out and found four chips. Right next to the firewire connection there's a TI chip that looks like a processor-tons of tiny pins and the clock crystal right next to it. It's labeled:
48EV80TC
TSB41AB

Also next to the firewire connector is a chip labeled:
PMC Flash
MFTQ
0411
Pn:39LV01R-90JC

Over by the USB connector is a chip labeled:
PL-3507
05014C

Is that any help? Needless to say, the manual has nothing about the chipsets used.

CharlesS · Oct 29, 2007, 10:26 PM

The only one of those numbers I recognize is the PL-3507 - that's Prolific's combo USB 2.0/FireWire chipset. AFAIK, the USB 2.0 part of it is pretty good, but Prolific is not good at FireWire and their chipsets are (or were) known to cause data corruption in the hard disks they're used with.

Of course, it's possible that the enclosure could be using the Prolific just for USB and one of those other model numbers is some other chipset for the FireWire (although at that price, I doubt it). What I'd probably do would be to connect it to a Mac via both USB and FireWire and compare what System Profiler says each time. If it's using Prolific for the FireWire, I'd probably just stick with using the USB 2.0 connector on that enclosure.

mduell · Oct 29, 2007, 10:29 PM

TSB41AB is a 3 port Firewire controller from TI, but the Prolific 3507 supports USB2 and FW400. So maybe they're only using the USB side of the Prolific chip.

CharlesS · Oct 30, 2007, 12:53 AM

3-port FireWire controller, but does it actually do the FireWire-to-ATA bridge?

ghporter · Oct 30, 2007, 08:28 PM

Maybe it's good that I just got this enclosure for an optical drive...

I'll eventually get around to playing with it with a hard drive and I'll post how it does.

mduell · Nov 12, 2007, 07:48 PM

Compuplus spammer?

ghporter · Nov 12, 2007, 09:02 PM

Originally Posted by mduell

Compuplus spammer?

Not anymore!