weird plug on old external IDE hard drive, what is it

M

multi-tasking_guy

Limp Gawd
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Jun 16, 2017
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I found an old external hard drive at a garage sale, it still works, its about 160gb

it has a weird plug, does anyone know what this is for? its not connected to anything,

its brothering me, not knowing what it does, and what i could use it for



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Does it look like a standard 5-1/4" CDROM drive would fit in place of the hard disk? Looks like it to me.
Looks like a homemade external drive someone made. They bought an external CDROM case, a Seagate drive, and put them together. The 1/8" jack is normally used for headphones so pressing play on the CDROM drive will play audio tracks on music CDs without computer involvement. It isn't used here since it's a hard disk.
Got any external pics of the front of the unit? Any stickers or model numbers?
 
Azrak said:
Does it look like a standard 5-1/4" CDROM drive would fit in place of the hard disk? Looks like it to me.
Looks like a homemade external drive someone made. They bought an external CDROM case, a Seagate drive, and put them together. The 1/8" jack is normally used for headphones so pressing play on the CDROM drive will play audio tracks on music CDs without computer involvement. It isn't used here since it's a hard disk.
Got any external pics of the front of the unit? Any stickers or model numbers?
Click to expand...

Azrak is right. I remember those, they were for audio cds.
 
Agree, IDE CDROMs used to have an analog audio cable that would route to the sound card. CDROM would be the DAC and soundcard would just accept as "audio in". Doing the real time "digital audio extraction" might put an unnecessary load on your single core Pentium 120.

https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/39413/cd-rom-audio-cable
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/how-do-you-enable-digital-cd-audio-in-windows-98.360436/

I'd imagine you could either plug headphones into this or connect it to the "audio in" jack of a sound card. Might have been needed if the PC only had USB 1.1.
 
The case has no labels, no stickers of models, nothing,

I did find this strange, but you guys must be right! it used to be a cd rom, it does have a removable plate at the front, as a cd-rom would have,

i wont post pictures as im sure everyone has seen it before


thanks for the help, its solved!
 
Wow that looks like someone added that CD analogue out socket as a mod. I remember the days when CD-roms used to have a headphone out socket on them too. A handy way to get round over zealous system admins that locked down the sound.
 
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