In the 3.5" space, "shucking" the enclosures off desktop USB storage devices almost always reveals a SATA 3.5" hard drive.
Kind of surprising that the drive control board in the Passport has the USB connector built right in. It makes me wonder a few things:
1. What are volumes like for 2.5" spinning rust drives? I understand that the vast majority of 3.5" drives go into servers, desktops, or storage devices where they operate on a SATA bus, so the small volume of USB drives are most cheaply made with a housing that uses the economies of scale of that industry and adds a USB conversion motherboard. A decade ago, I would have said most 2.5" drives are used with SATA connectors in laptops, but who's buying laptops that don't use solid state storage anymore?
2. What's the cost difference for a drive control board with optional pads for both SATA and USB, only one installed at a time, vs one that only supports SATA?
3. Can you pull off the control board and replace it with one from the same lineup that uses SATA, like you would in a data recovery operation where some IC on the board burned out? Or is the mechanical component also specialized?
Kind of surprising that the drive control board in the Passport has the USB connector built right in. It makes me wonder a few things:
1. What are volumes like for 2.5" spinning rust drives? I understand that the vast majority of 3.5" drives go into servers, desktops, or storage devices where they operate on a SATA bus, so the small volume of USB drives are most cheaply made with a housing that uses the economies of scale of that industry and adds a USB conversion motherboard. A decade ago, I would have said most 2.5" drives are used with SATA connectors in laptops, but who's buying laptops that don't use solid state storage anymore?
2. What's the cost difference for a drive control board with optional pads for both SATA and USB, only one installed at a time, vs one that only supports SATA?
3. Can you pull off the control board and replace it with one from the same lineup that uses SATA, like you would in a data recovery operation where some IC on the board burned out? Or is the mechanical component also specialized?