[vox-tech] External IDE Drive Converter

[Micah Cowan]

David Margolis writes:
 > Has anybody had any success using a USB or parallel IDE drive converter.
 > I've got both an extra hard drive and an extra 4x2x24 CD-RW I'd love to
 > do something creative and portable with.  One or both
 > of those would go nicely in one of several available external drive kits.
 > 
 > So I guess this is a few questions.  Has anyone pulled off using an
 > external USB drive kit?  If not, what's a good parallel one?  Has anyone
 > pulled off burning CDs in a converted IDE CD-RW (USB or parallel)?

I've been less than impressed with the current state of the USB stuff
- it's gotten very good, but it's still got a few too many bugs for me
to get comfortable with it. It is actively progressing, so it's
entirely possible that the chief problems I'm aware of have been fixed
in the last month and a half...

My most recent experience with it was in using a USB Mass
Storage Device camera.  I could mount it and transfer files from it,
but there was some frequently occuring situation which the drivers
handled incorrectly, resulting in a permanently zombied, unkillable
kernel thread. I couldn't close even close the xterm running the
program which was reading from that mount point. And all further
attempts to access the device would fail.

-Micah