[SGVLUG] Caseless Usb-to-ide adaptors.

[Claude Felizardo]

On 4/7/06, Michael Proctor-Smith <mproctor13 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Claude at a general meeting you talked about having problems getting a
> caseless usb to ide adaptor to work with linux. I have a couple of
> those, and ran into some problems, as well weird part is that they
> seem to work with cd/dvd drives, laptop(2.5") drives, and smaller
> capacity[4.3GB] 3.5" drives, but nothing with a couple of 120gb maxtor
> drives I tried. I tried plugging it into my mac laptop and had the
> same results as with linux.
>
> Anyone else have similar problems? Did you solve them?

Nope.  I looked it up at the web site and saw lots of people posting
mixed results.  Some got it to work, others couldn't.   Another factor
was the firmware version.    Don't have access to my laptop right now
but I found a note with some info about it:

     eagleTec
     vendor 05e3
     product id 0702
     revision number 0.33

I tried it with I think 3 different hard drives of various brands and
had pretty much the same results.  The system would initially
recognize the device but eventually something would die.  Don't recall
if it was ever mounted.  It's like a module would abort and while the
system continued to run, it wouldn't see the device anymore until I
rebooted.  Forgot to try plugging in a different device.

Places I looked:

http://linuxfocus.org/~guido/usb/
http://www.linux-usb.org/

One place suggested doing a 'rmmod ehci-hcd' before plugging the
device in but then it wouldn't see the device at all.

It worked fine with winxp but then that required FAT and I was looking
for a quick way to backup some TiVo files before rebuilding my server.

Again, this was with a caseless USB to IDE adapter, not an enclosure. 
It has it's own power supply that plugs directly into the IDE power
socket.   I'm able to use other products that are actual enclosures.  
Don't recall the details but one is a 2.5" that is USB powered, a 3.5"
enclosure and a 5.25" box each with external power supplies.  All work
fine.

Now a couple of people at the meeting had suggested changing some kind
of configuration file but I never got around to investigating further.

claude