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Drives for Laptops
A disk enclosure is essentially a specialized chassis designed to hold and power disk drives while providing a mechanism to allow them to communicate to one or more separate computers. more...
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Drive enclosures provide power to the drives therein and convert the data sent across their native data bus into a format usable by an external connection on the computers to which it is connected. In some cases, the conversion is as trivial as carrying a signal between different connector types. In others, it is so complicated as to require a separate embedded system to retransmit data over connector and signal of a different standard. Factory-assembled external hard disk drives, external DVD-ROM drives, and others are all built around disk enclosures. Bulkier models built around 2.5" & 3.5" hard drives and full-height 5.25" DVD-ROM drives use enclosures that are often nearly identical to OEM enclosures.
Benefits
Key benefits to using external disk enclosures include:
Adding additional storage space and media types to small form factor and laptop computers, as well as sealed embedded systems, such as digital video recorders.;
Adding more drives to any given server or workstation than their chassis can hold.;
Transferring data between non-networked computers, jokingly known as sneakernet.;
Adding a backup source with a separate power supply from the connected computer.;
Sharing the data on a drive in a network-aware enclosure.;
Preventing the heat from a disk drive from increasing the heat inside an operating computer case.;
Simple and cheap approach to hot swapping.;
Recovering the data from a broken or damaged computer.;
Lower the cost of removable storage by reusing hardware designed for internal use.;
More memory than CDs, DVDs, and Flash Drives.;
Better protection of files from damage, age, weathering, and corruption, than CDs, DVDs, and Flash Drives.;
Consumer enclosures
In the consumer market, commonly used configurations of drive enclosures utilize magnetic hard drives or optical disc drives inside of USB, FireWire, or Serial ATA enclosures. External 3.5" floppy drive are also fairly common, following a trend to not integrate floppy drives into compact and laptop computers, started by Apple Computer with their iMac. Pre-built external drives are available through all major manufacturers of hard drives, as well as several third-parties.
Form factors
"5.25 inch" drive: (5.75 in x 1.63 in x 8 in = 146.1 mm x 41.4 mm x 203 mm)
Most desktop models of drives for optical 120-mm disks (DVD-ROM or CD-ROM drives, CD or DVD burners), are designed to be mounted into a so-called "5.25-inch slot", which obtained its nickname because this slot size was initially used by drives for 5.25-inch diameter floppy disks in the IBM PC AT. (The original "5.25-inch slot" in the IBM PC was with 3.25 in (82.6 mm) twice as high as the one commonly used today.);
Read more at Wikipedia.org
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