Will this enclosure work w/this hard drive?

Got a generic enclosure, usb-2 compliant, with only a 20-wire cable
inside to attach to the h/d. Will a h/d that uses a 40-conductor cable work
in this as an external, USB-2 harddrive? I'm running Windows XP-Corp /all
updates, all on an Asus, A7N8X rev-2, n-force 2 mobo. TIA, s

 

Let`s not forget that the USB plug only has 4 wires in it.
When I use my very portable USB laptop external hard drive, I do not have to
supply power to the drive as the USB port provides this. This means that we
are left with 2 wires to carry the data.
I use 3 external USB cases for various jobs. 1 x cd burner, 1 x dvd burner
and 1 x large hard drive and a nice sized USB memory stick tops it all off
nicely.
Your external drive needs to be jumpered as master. Put it all together
and enjoy it. It will work just fine.

 

be powered with the ac power cord. Telling me about master jumper really
helped. s

 

Do you means a 2x20 connector ? A 40 conductor cable will work, but for
the higher transfer rates, an 80 wire, 40 pin connectorized cable is
better, as every second wire is connected to ground, and isolates the
signals from one another. The cable ends up with a better control over
the cable impedance, and makes high speed transfer (like ATA100 or
ATA133) possible.

With tiny enclosures and laptop style drives, a 44 wire cable is used,
and I think the difference is there are power wires in that cable.
To complicate matters, the pin spacing may be different between the
40 pin and 44 pin cables. That doesn't sound like your enclosure.

Of course, from a practical perspective, USB is limited by protocol
overhead, to a transfer rate that is less than the cable rate, and
also, the conversion chip on the "generic adapter" makes all the
difference to the actual data transfer rate you'll be seeing.
There is a tendency for the older "dog slow" chips to be used
in cheap enclosures, so this is a time where reading reviews
of various enclosures before buying is a must. You might see
33MB/sec, for example, near the start of the disk. Which makes
the cable quality I mentioned in the first paragraph kind of
academic. I don't know if there is a way to verify the transfer
rate used on the parallel cable inside the enclosure or not -
reading the spec sheet for the enclosure may be the only way
to tell whether the interface is an aggressive one or not.

If you were to have some trouble with the drive, you could
always temporarily connect the drive to one of your computer's
IDE interfaces, and then use one of those utilities from the
drive manufacturer's web site, to change the maximum transfer
rate on the disk, to something that causes less errors. This
is only if you are experiencing corrupt data or choppy benchmarking
performance, implying retries are being used between the bridge
chip and the disk.

Good luck,
Paul