I am looking for any recomendations for an External Drive Enclosure that will allow me to Plug both an Internal either ATA or SATA and 5.25" drive such as an DVD-Burner and plug into any usb or firewire port, I prefer usb for compatibility reasons.

My Idea here is to be able to cary around in my car (mobile service tech) this case and be able to have access to both data on the hard drive and have access to a DVD-Burner all in one external case.

I have looked high and low but can only seem to find an case that will do one or the other, but not both.

Any recomendations?

Many thanks,

MrChris

http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/SubCateg...?SubCategory=43

Thanks for the reply,

I looked at all 3 pages but none of them (from what I can see) will support both a 5 1/4" and 3.5" drive at the same time and allow me to plug the external case into a USB or Firewire Port on a PC.

MrChris

Edited January 31, 200620 yr by MrChris

You aren't going to find an external enclosure that supports both simultaneously because of power and bandwidth constraints(SATA would solve this, but consequently, there are no enclosures that support multiple types of devices yet).

However, it would be possible to build such an enclosure using the components from two external enclosures.. and while this wouldn't solve the problem of limited available connectors, it would make them more portable.

If you can't settle with that, there's always the option of eliminating the DVD writer completely and going with a larger hard drive. Any files you need to back up could be stored on a seperate partition, while any CDs or DVDs could be run from the drive itself.

After digging and digging, It looks like I'm asking for a tad too much. I think that If I can find a power supply internal or external that will support both a DVD Burner and a IDE/ATA/SATA drive at the same time I can fabricate a case together maybe. O well I'll keep looking.

I would think such a thing would be really nice to have. That way you can always access DVD/CD media for burning purposes and a large drive for storage purposes.

Thanks again,

MrChris

Edited January 31, 200620 yr by MrChris

As was mentioned...why not just use the hard drive for backup purposes? Copying the files to an external hard drive would be faster than burning them anyway. You could also keep copies of all of your software CDs/DVDs that you carry around on the external hard drive. This would keep you from having to swap disks, prevent lost/scratched disks and, again, be faster than accessing an optical drive.