Two Lacies, One fool.

[Springsteen]

G'day everybody!
Today a good friend of mine gave me two old Lacie drives... d2 i believe. One is very old and only support FireWire 400. The other one is slightly newer and features FW400,800 and USB2.

Now here is the fun part: both drives are dead. Clickety-click!

This puts me in the position of buying new harddrives, but these drives only support PATA (ATA, IDE.. you pick one), and the sizes are slightly too small for my preference (in my country, the best you will find is 320 GB).

So here is my idea; modify the d2 to accept SATA drives.
Now, it's sort of unortodox, but i was thinking that if i took another working drive (cheap iOmega, case scratched, ugly and needs a new SATA drive) and somehow connected the internal light to it, that it would work pretty okayish.

Any toughts on this? Or should i just give up on it? Use some sort of PATA to SATA connector?

Any toughts and tinkering is welcome.

 

[opinio]

G'day everybody!
Today a good friend of mine gave me two old Lacie drives... d2 i believe. One is very old and only support FireWire 400. The other one is slightly newer and features FW400,800 and USB2.

Now here is the fun part: both drives are dead. Clickety-click!

This puts me in the position of buying new harddrives, but these drives only support PATA (ATA, IDE.. you pick one), and the sizes are slightly too small for my preference (in my country, the best you will find is 320 GB).

So here is my idea; modify the d2 to accept SATA drives.
Now, it's sort of unortodox, but i was thinking that if i took another working drive (cheap iOmega, case scratched, ugly and needs a new SATA drive) and somehow connected the internal light to it, that it would work pretty okayish.

Any toughts on this? Or should i just give up on it? Use some sort of PATA to SATA connector?

Any toughts and tinkering is welcome.

I hate to put your project down but it is hugely complicated? Even if you get the adapters couldn't you just buy a 1 TB external drive on eBay or amazon etc? You would need to order parts online anyway. Also you run a risk of the adapters not working with the FireWire HDD controllers.

FYI

http://www.ebay.com/itm/PATA-IDE-TO...t=US_Drive_Cables_dapters&hash=item5d2c167f60

 

[Macman45]

With WD externals costing less than £100 now, I really think you'd be better off taking the advice above, I've dismantled a few of these type of enclosure and it really isn't woth the fuss.

Grab a newbie and put the dead ones in the trash!

 

[thedeske]

Agree with the others. Get a modern SATA external.
Spinning drives are really cheap these days.

 

[Giuly]

Or you get a $5 IDE to SATA adapter and install a 2.5" drive. This may or may not work with enclosures that shipped with hard drives <137GB.

However, hard drives with enclosures are often less expensive than bare hard drives.