Can a HDD be used in a optical drive enclosure?

[Sniper82]

Was offered a DVD burner with external enclosure and am wondering will these work with hard drives? I know mounting will be a problem but my goal is to be able to put a hard drive it copy files to it then take it out. It's USB/IDE if that matters.

Don't wanna get in my system everytime I want to back stuff up.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Sniper82
Was offered a DVD burner with external enclosure and am wondering will these work with hard drives? I know mounting will be a problem but my goal is to be able to put a hard drive it copy files to it then take it out. It's USB/IDE if that matters.

Don't wanna get in my system everytime I want to back stuff up.

There are many, many, MANY external enclosures you can buy in the ~$20 range.

If you're asking if the one that comes with the external DVD drive will work with an IDE hard drive... maybe. They're probably just using an off-the-shelf USB->IDE adapter chip. They might only be running it at ATA33 speed, which would hurt performance of a hard drive.