[conspire] questions re firewire pci card and firewire enclosure for 30GB hard drive

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Darlene Wallach (freepalestin at dslextreme.com):

> However, my current internal hard drive is IDE (ATA) so
> the scsi external disk drive enclosure wouldn't fit
> my hardware needs.

Darlene --

You can probably run any reasonably long IDE ("PATA") ribbon cable out the
back of your box, and over to the external drive box.  It's not pretty,
and is frowned on, but it'd probably work just fine.

(There are length limits for the IDE spec, and ribbon cables both emit
and are susceptible to RFI.  Thus, they're not really intended for
external use.  But, in a pinch, you can use them that way.)

This of course would be an alternative to your Firewire plan -- and
would suffer the disadvantage of not being casually unpluggable, unlike
Firewire.