External harddrive to internal harddrive

scottbown · 10-10-2006, 9:42 PM

Hi,

I recently purchased an USB 500 GB external hard drive, it's two 250GB, (in Raid 0) in a single hard drive enclosure.

I wanted to take one of the 250GB drives and fit it to a spare IDE cable internal to a harddriveless PC. I know this is a little backwards but i need to put windows on it and hoped to use PC as MP3/video server.

I wondered if anyone has ever tried to this? is it as simple as take apart and unplug from enclosure and plug into IDE and Power?

Do these External USB hard drives have a special firm ware that may prevent this?

I also warned what would happen to a 500GB with x2 drives (raid 0) if one of the drives was suddenly disconnected. would it fail to recongise the drive or just show 250GB less space?

Thanks,

Scott

JohnG · 11-10-2006, 8:17 AM

I would leave it well alone, especially if you already have data on there. If you take one drive out of the Raid 0 setup you lose everything on there. O imagine that the firmware in the hard drive case will also be looking for 2 drives in a Raid 0 configuration.

*The Dude* · 11-10-2006, 8:48 AM

Yeah, leave well alone I'd say too.

For the sake of a £50 drive, it's really not even worth the effort, let alone the risk.

scottbown · 11-10-2006, 10:37 AM

yeah you are probably right,

Something i didn't mention it the external drive it noisy, somethings definatly loose as it rattles constantly when on. (which is other reason i wanted to dump it inside PC case.)

I think i'll just take the external enclosure apart, and try and get rid of the rattle.

Thanks,

Scott

HCK · 11-10-2006, 1:28 PM

If you took apart your enclosure and one of the drives in the RAID0 configuration then you would lose your data. Any drives that are removed in a RAID 0 or 1 would lose data, RAID5 you can afford to lose 1 disk.

As far as I know external drives are just normal drives in a enclosure so you should be able to put them in internally.