Remove drive from external case...
 

Hi,

I've got an external 500GB USB hard drive...

Can I pull the drive from the case and put it inside my PC? I'm guessing it's a SATA drive inside. Would there be anything special in the electronics that would prevent doing this??

Re: Remove drive from external case...
 

The only issue I can think of at the moment is the master / slave jumper that the drive might have.

Re: Remove drive from external case...
 

SATA would be a direct plugin, IDE might have a jumper..

Re: Remove drive from external case...
 

So how does a PC desigante a C: drive if you have two SATA drives?

Re: Remove drive from external case...
 

It's written to the partition by the windows disk management for fixed drives.. Hence you can actually boot into a single D: drive ;) It's only <win9x that allocated drive letters per boot allocation. In the case of SATA drives without a boot letter attached to the (like a dvd/removable) it'll allocate the next drive letter. In this case as long as the boot config is correct or manually chosen then it should just get the next drive letter

Re: Remove drive from external case...
 

Drive letters on Windows have nothing to do with the any physical component of the drive. Hell, I have a system with C:, D:, all the way to Z: without any hard drives in it.

To the OP: it'll work fine.

Re: Remove drive from external case...
 

SATA is done on a 'one drive - one port' basis, IDE can have 2 drives sharing a cable, therefore SATA doesn't have a 'Master / Slave / Cable Select' jumper, just more sockets.

As for designating a drive letter, that's down to the OS, boot priority though is set in the bios and by which port you have which drive connected to.

Re: Remove drive from external case...
 

Thanks - thought so but just wanted to check before I ripped it out of the caddy.