Caddy (hardware)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Hard disk drive caddy

A hard disc drive caddy is a sheath, typically plastic or metallic, within which a hard disc drive can be placed and connected with the same type of adapters as a conventional motherboard and power supply would use. The exterior of the caddy typically has two female sockets, used for data transfer and power.

A number of variants exist:

• Some larger caddies can support several devices at once and can feature either separate outputs to connect each device to a different computer, or a single output to connect both over the same data cable.
• Certain don't require a power supply, instead depending on the computer it is connected for power.
• Some caddies have integrated fans with which to keep the drives within at a cool temperature.
• caddies for all major standards exist, supporting for example ATA, SCSI and S-ATA drives and USB, SCSI and FireWire outputs.

Advantages:

• relatively high transfer speed; typically faster than other common portable media such as CDs, DVDs and USB keys, slower than drives connected using solely ATA, SCSI and S-ATA connectors
• storage; typically larger than CDs, DVDs and USB keys
• price-to-storage ratio; typically better than CDs, DVDs and USB keys

Disadvantages:

• power; most variants require a supply, unlike CDs, DVDs and USB keys
• size; typically larger than CDs, DVDs and USB keys

[edit] Optical media caddy

An optical media caddy is a plastic sheath that houses a disc such as a CD-ROM. This sheath is then inserted into a caddy based drive, which reads the media as would a typical, caddyless drive. The sheath resembles a jewel case somewhat, but is different as a jewel case is only used to protect the disc during transport.

This technology is relatively rare, due to taking up more space than a bare disc and being less convenient for casual use and due to advances in optical media manufacturing having made discs more robust over time, but is still available for more recent formats such as DVD-ROMs.

Devices that use this system can also be said to be caddy drives or caddy load(ing).