[Leica] Seagate - again

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

Ouch, it's so hard to read all this and be thousands of miles away unable to 
help.

A lot of people are confusing drives with enclosures. The drive mates to the 
enclosure using a disk protocol, of which only ATA and SATA are in common 
use. (There are other disk protocols, but external enclosures that use them 
are extremely rare).

The enclosure mates with the computer using a peripheral protocol, of which 
only USB and FireWire are in common use.

In the world of SATA disks, if the connector fits, then the electronics will 
work. They learned their lesson from that not being true about ATA disks. In 
order for an ATA disk to work the connector has to fit and also the jumpers 
have to be right, and you have to be pretty skilled and careful to get the 
jumpers right in every case (though most ATA disks shipped in the last few 
years have the jumpers set at the factory to a combination that will work in 
most enclosures).

If it is a SATA disk, and the enclosure is bad, you can take the disk out of 
the enclosure and put it into another SATA enclosure of similar vintage, and 
it will work with no risk to you. The reason the enclosures need to be of 
similar vintage is that older enclosures don't deal well with larger more 
modern disks. It's always OK to replace an older SATA enclosure with a newer 
one, but not vice versa.

If it is an ATA disk, it is safe to move it to another enclosure of the same 
brand or brand family. And if you move it to an enclosure that doesn't like 
your jumper settings, the disk will not be damaged. It just won't work, but 
you can back it out with no damage to the disk or to your data.

It is not a good idea to take a disk that has been in an external USB or 
FireWire enclosure and mount it inside your computer. It can be done and it 
usually works, but it's kind of like the home birth of a baby: most of the 
time it works just fine, but every now and then you really want to have a 
surgeon nearby.