Bennett Price wrote:
> My backup device is a USB 2.0 250 MB Iomega Hard Drive.I'd like to put
> it in my garage, requiring about 20 to 25 feet of wire. The official
> USB specs say 5 meters max; if further use a hub/repeater.
>
> I'm wondering how realistic the 5 meter spec is. I recall that parallel
> printer cables were supposed to be limited to 10 feet or so; 75 foot
> cables worked just fine. Same thing with the specs for RS-232 cables.
>
> Does anyone have any real world experience with long USB 2.0 cables?
> I'm thinking of building mine using unshielded CAT5 cable, one twisted
> pair for power, another for data. Wise? foolish?

Probably the least troublesome way to do this would be to purchase one
of the devices which allows a USB storage device to be utilized as
Network Attached Storage (NAS). Once the device is network-aware the
distance limitations become less troublesome -- 75-100 meters for wired
Ethernet and probably 50 meters for wireless. Do a search for "USB NAS"
(without the quotes of course) and see what pops up.

Out of curiosity, why would one want the backup drive in the garage? I
have three 200gB backup drives I built from spare hard drives and keep
one of them in my safe deposit box at the bank and one in my neighbor's
safe and one in use and I rotate them every couple of weeks. But the
garage really baffles me.
--
John McGaw
[Knoxville, TN, USA]
http://johnmcgaw.com