Add an External FireWire Hard DriveMay 17 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line My 4 IDE connectors are full, I have several older, smaller hard drives. There are many uses for them and an external enclosure is just the ticket.
Just why would I want an external hard drive? Let me count the ways; 1) The ideal backup is another hard drive, 2) An external drive used for backup has an on/off switch so that it is normally OFF and cannot be affected by a virus, 3) Hard drives have become so cheap that unlimited, practical storage is a reality, 4) This is an easy way to ensure transportability and compatibility between remote computers, 5) It is a means to perform high speed data transfers to say a CDR from a dedicated source, 6) This is an extremely safe way to keep confidential data safe from hackers, exposure time in greatly reduced 7) You never have enough money, time or hard drive space. How many uses can you come up with? There must be many more. To have a really fast external hard drive as well as unlimited space and total portability, connect the drive via an enclosure that utilizes the FireWire link. I have always been pleased with Lava Computers products, so I opted for their FireWire enclosure. The first step is to install the FireWire host adapter (assuming that you do not have one already). See my epinions essay on FireWire, for just how to do that. OK, now lets get to the hard drive enclosure. The first thing to do is make sure that the IDE hard drive that you are going to use is set as the MASTER drive. A jumper setting does this; most manufacturers provide the necessary information right on the drive. Now just follow the well-illustrated instruction sheet. The enclosure comes with a small ribbon cable to attach the drive to the enclosure. Remove the top of the enclosure and from there on you really don’t need the instructions because things are quite intuitive. To fit the drive in the enclosure, remove the interface board by unscrewing the rear plate to which the board is fixed. You will see a mounting plate in the enclosure. Unscrew it and place the drive on it and fasten it with the four provided screws. Now you can place the drive attached to the mounting bracket into the enclosure. The ribbon cable is short, so I attached it to the drive end before placing the drive in the enclosure. There are two ways to place it but only one is proper. You will soon find out if you made a mistake, but you can avoid it by making sure that the ribbon cable lines up with the connector on the interface board. Once you place the drive in the enclosure, you fasten the rear plate with the interface board attached, on the enclosure. There are slots on the two sides of the enclosure for the plate to fit. Just fasten the four short screws and that step is done. There is a familiar hard drive power cable on the interface board; you now connect it to the drive. Now fasten the LED cable to the Interface board. Secure the hard drive by a screw on each side; there are pre-drilled holes. Put the enclosure cover back on and you are ready to connect the FireWire cable to the FireWire host card. It functions just like a USB connector and looks similar. The last step is to connect the power supply cable to the enclosure and an outlet. There is an ON/OFF switch on the enclosure. The LED will tell you if there is power. The operating system will automatically assign a drive letter. This entire process took less than 15 minutes. I was amazed at the simplicity of the installation. The only tool required was a Phillips head screwdriver. I place identical files on a standard IDE drive and one on the Lava Fire Drive. I then transferred these files to another hard drive, a CDRW, a superdisk and a floppy. In all cases, the transfer from the Fire Drive was faster, but was most pronounced with larger files. This is great for the off line storage of large graphics files. It is so easy to place a hard drive in the enclosure that I have several of my old smaller drives dedicated to this purpose. One is a backup of my C drive, the others are for storage of graphics and critical data. Now I fell safe from viruses, hackers and the fear of running out of hard drive space.  |
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