USB HDD enclosure to DVD connector

posted Feb 2nd 2010 1:00pm by
filed under: tool hacks

This is a “why didn’t I think of that?” idea. [Alec] needed a way to connect an IDE DVD drive using USB. Rather than order a connector he pulled the circuit board out of an old USB hard drive enclosure and connected to his DVD drive. Bang, recognized and running.

This will prove extremely handy if you have a netbook without an optical drive. We’ve used Unetbootin to move Linux ISO images to a thumb drive in the past. In addition to getting around the lack of an optical drive, this saves burning the data to a piece of plastic. But, you should be able to use this with a Leopard retail DVD instead of a 16GB thumb drive for a Hackintosh conversion. That means you could install Leopard on a netbook without needing a Mac to transfer the disk image to your thumb drive first.



123 Responses to USB HDD enclosure to DVD connector

  • cw says:
    February 3, 2010 at 2:39 pm

    Been doing this for ages with different comp.
    Lots of other stuff u can connect too :)

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  • cw says:
    February 3, 2010 at 2:40 pm

    @Ryan

    ;)

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  • michael says:
    February 3, 2010 at 4:51 pm

    wow, this is as old as the sun itself, ive been doing this since last century!

    i guess this would make my Compact flash to IDE converter hack a day worthy material too? (its the opposite way around, you plug an ide drive in via a CF card reader)

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  • ADam says:
    February 3, 2010 at 5:39 pm

    woh awesome hack! Great content. (sorry for the sarcasm… it stems from dissapointment) Does any one know a site that is as good as hackaday.com used to be? sorry to be a downer….

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  • PetFoodz says:
    February 3, 2010 at 7:42 pm

    Good Idea!..

    Reply Report comment
  • Itwork4me says:
    February 3, 2010 at 9:13 pm

    I wish I was the 100th comment. Doesn’t HAD give that commentor a free arduino or something?

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  • Drew says:
    February 4, 2010 at 2:11 am

    I agree, if the DVD drive has a PATA (IDE) connector and the enclosure has a PATA connector- this isn’t really a “hack” hack. It’s more like an obvious but useful “repurposing”.

    Here’s something LESS obvious: I have 1 PATA and 1 SATA external Venus enclosure. I also have a laptop as my main computer, and an old desktop with an amazing PCI slot sound card. I’ve been wondering- would there be a way to ACTUALLY hack a PCI molex onto the USB interface of one of those enclosures, to use the PCI sound card extenally with my laptop?

    This may seem stupid- they make USB sound cards. However, they are mostly crap, and less feature rich than most PCI and PCI express sound cards. There is a company that makes external PCI enclosures for this sort of stuff, but they are 750$!!!! Surely there is a hacker’s solution in there somewhere! Any sugguestions?

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  • Bob says:
    February 4, 2010 at 3:23 am

    Slow news day, hackaday?

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  • Rat says:
    February 4, 2010 at 7:12 am

    Wow. What’s next on Hack A Day? Swapping out LEDs on a new case?

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  • latincrow says:
    February 4, 2010 at 8:28 am

    do it all the time but for a permanent solution nothing like good old duct tape

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  • Frogz says:
    February 4, 2010 at 5:31 pm

    Wow. What’s next on Hack A Day? Swapping out LEDs on a new case?

    Posted at 7:12 am on Feb 4th, 2010 by Rat

    um…
    they…did it…
    NES with a blue power led…

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  • Blizzarddemon says:
    February 4, 2010 at 6:58 pm

    They sell $10 ide to usb cables on ebay, and I have to tell you, it’s the best 10 bucks I ever spent.

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  • heretic says:
    February 5, 2010 at 6:33 am

    lol I fail to see how this is a hack, it still uses the unmodified interface for the purpose it was designed for.

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  • The Peso says:
    February 5, 2010 at 10:48 pm

    Oh yeah, Ive had a similar setup to this for about 2 years now. I had a WD external HD that I literally blew up because I accidentally plugged the wrong chord into it, so It got about 12 extra volts.BUT the circuit board still worked after re- soldering the power connnection, so I hooked up another used hard drive I had to it, and it still works. I tried hooking up an old cd rom to it, but it didnt work…… probably has something to do with it being from 1995…. I tried splitting the wire to hood up 2 hard drives to it, but I think the power supply for the enclosure doesnt have quite enough ass to power 2 HDs. Ive been thinking about swiping the power supply from an old windows ME box I have because it does have a switch on it. Does anyone have any suggestions?

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  • rooftop ridicule says:
    February 6, 2010 at 9:56 pm

    yay I’ve done this. a handy tip.

    cover it in blue leds next time.

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  • MysticShadow says:
    February 7, 2010 at 11:07 am

    WOW!!!! HAD has HAD its DAY!!!

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  • Ralph says:
    February 21, 2010 at 4:13 pm

    Can anyone help plz? im trying to connect a dvd optical drive that was on an HP laptop by usb, but the dvd drive has this weird hardware wire!

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  • arby says:
    February 23, 2010 at 1:21 pm

    Yeah, I’ve been doing this for a good long while.

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  • Volfram says:
    February 28, 2010 at 1:59 pm

    @Ralph: that’s called a SATA(Serial ATA) cable. Your adapter probably has an IDE cable. You’ll have to find an adapter which supports SATA. ThinkGeek.com has these: http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/usb-gadgets/a7ea/ for about the same price that you’d pay for an enclosure. They also used to have these: http://www.cheap-battery.com/cb02102.html but apparently don’t anymore. I managed to get one, and it works great.

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  • Mrgatz85 says:
    March 2, 2010 at 11:22 pm

    Haha i done this in like 2000. i was help the IT guy at my school for cred and sat down one day to fix a external cdbrunner and poof i saw the connector for ide . at that time though it was a firewire not usb so we had to wait tell it boot what ever OS it needed and saw it without any problems. great for when we had to restore with norton ghost. man i could have told people this years ago just thought it was common knowledge.

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  • usb hdd enclosure says:
    April 13, 2010 at 12:46 pm

    Hey thanks man! my netbook doesn’t have a dvd drive. this helped me a lot!

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  • Timmy Ramone says:
    July 11, 2010 at 9:16 am

    I’ve done this in the past, too. But, as others have noted, DVD-burners don’t always work properly using this hack (this is true for both PATA and SATA). Even those “universal” IDE-SATA-USB adapters don’t always work; not sure why, though it may have something to do with the bridge circuitry, mentioned earlier by Nicholas.

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  • Cereal says:
    January 11, 2011 at 8:15 am

    Thanks, I was just thinking about using my enclosure to connect a DVD drive to my netbook, wondering if it’s even possible – I didn’t want to damage the enclosure. Gonna try it right away! :)

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