As you might imagine, I had a bunch of data on my old HP Pavilion disk that I needed to transfer to the new machine.

I first tried a no-name USB drive enclosure that ran off of the USB port. I paid $10 for the little device and discovered that it wasn't even recognized under Vista, without loading the enclosed driver. Not only that, but my 80 GB 2.5 inch drive pulled 750 milliamps of current. Powering a device by USB is usually limited to 500 milliamps.

It started feeling like a home improvement project, as I traveled back again to the computer store.

This time I looked over all the models and discovered the Sabrent SATA/IDE external enclosure for about $25. The packaging said that it worked with everything from Windows 98 up, Mac OSX and Linux. It was designed for 3.5 inch disks, had an external power brick and thumbscrew attached covers.

Installation of the 2.5 inch laptop disk required the use of a laptop to standard IDE drive adapter. See graphic #2 for a picture of the laptop IDE adapter board. I also stuck a small piece of folded cardboard on top of the drive, before I bolted on the cover, to keep it from moving around inside the case.

Make sure you correctly plug the 2.5 inch drive into the adapter, otherwise it will show up as /dev/sdb in the system log and it won't mount correctly. The Sabrent SATA/IDE external enclosure has plug-and-play capability with my ASUS laptop and Kubuntu.

Down the road, I may pick up a 1 tera-byte drive and use it in the external enclosure. I'm confident that it will work just fine.

Reaching Our Destination

External media seem to work very well with Kubuntu. The external storage drives, SD card and CD device all functioned with minimal effort. I'm ready for a new adventure when USB 3.0 comes out?

Rob Reilly is a consultant and freelance technology writer. His interests include Linux, anything high-tech, speaking, and working with conferences. You can visit his web page at http://home.earthlink.net/~robreilly.

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