HDD Caddy

[Curiousmike]

Hi,

I have removed my good HDD from my desktop PC and would like the facility to use externally in a caddy through connection to my laptop.

The dimensions of the HDD are 4inches wide by 5.75 ??inches long.

The caddies I have seen for sale are either 2.5 or 3.5 inch.

Are there no 4 inch available?

My HDD is IDE but as well as USB I have sata socket on my laptop ,which is the best method of connection provided I can buy the right size Caddy?

Hope you can help.

[Plastic Nev]

Hi Mike and welcome to Extreme Tech Support - Free PC Help.

The dimensions of 2.5 or 3.5 for hard drives are actually the size of the disk inside them, and not to be confused with the external dimensions of the casing.

However, by your description you need a 3.5 inch caddy, if all you wish to do is access the data on the hard drive a USB connection is sufficient, so an IDE to USB caddy is all you need.

However if you wish to set the laptops BIOS so you can boot the laptop from the drive in the caddy, unless you can set the BIOS to boot from USB, you may need one that is IDE internally with SATA out, or at the very least an adapter lead that is IDE to SATA.

Bearing in mind that if any version of Windows is installed, it will see a new environment and refuse to boot anyway, only free operating systems such as Linux based can boot into a different environment.

 

Hope that helps,

 

Nev.

[Curiousmike]

Hi Mike and welcome to Extreme Tech Support - Free PC Help.

The dimensions of 2.5 or 3.5 for hard drives are actually the size of the disk inside them, and not to be confused with the external dimensions of the casing.

However, by your description you need a 3.5 inch caddy, if all you wish to do is access the data on the hard drive a USB connection is sufficient, so an IDE to USB caddy is all you need.

However if you wish to set the laptops BIOS so you can boot the laptop from the drive in the caddy, unless you can set the BIOS to boot from USB, you may need one that is IDE internally with SATA out, or at the very least an adapter lead that is IDE to SATA.

Bearing in mind that if any version of Windows is installed, it will see a new environment and refuse to boot anyway, only free operating systems such as Linux based can boot into a different environment.

 

Hope that helps,

 

Nev.

 

Many thanks for your prompt reply.

I am no longer confused about sizes.