HDD External Enclosure Primer

[DaFunkyUnit]

I've ordered the USB/Firewire enclosure that was on the deals page coupla days ago, and just ordered the Seagate 200GB drive thats on the deals page as of today. I've never installed an external HD before, so i was wondering if anyone can give a quick rundown on the steps to get the thing up and running.

one of the biggest questions I have is how do I go about formatting the drive. Do I just hook it up into the enclosure, plug it in (Firewire), and Windows (what I'm running) will recognize it and it'll let me format it?

[DaFunkyUnit]

also, should I partition the drive in any particular way? its pretty much going to be used as the "storage locker" so definitely its going to be formated in FAT32. or can I just leave it as one huge chunk? (that Windows will recognize?)

[Merlin]

I set one up a few months back mainly for emergency backups and archiving and they are pretty simple to set up and use. From the research I've done it is better to use Firewire over USB2.0 as USB has a greater load on the cpu. The one I set up had a drive that was already formatted but it was still pretty easy. Just install the drive into the enclosure, plug the power in, and then plug it into the computer. I'm using Windows 2000 and it found the drive right away. Before I could use it though I needed to go into drive management and install and activate the drive. From there it worked just like any internal hard drive. It is really easy and straight forward. As DF said you can read the direstions if needed, they'll only be about half a page or so.

[DaFunkyUnit]

cool, thanks guys! just making sure there are no "hidden surprises" or anything tricky involved.

[DaFunkyUnit]

yay! i gots me a cool 200 GB external drive now! (well, more like 187 GB, due to the inherent addressing/cluster size issues).

I would like to make a couple of (not so obvious) points for future reference for anyone else who may be doing this:

1) Master/Slave/Cable Select jumper setting on the drive shouldnt(?) matter. I had it set to Master and Cable Select, and it worked for both.

2) Found out (http://www.gotapex.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=660582#post660582) that you have to format in NTFS and not FAT32. Thanks for the (mis)direction, DarkFury! :mad: ;)

3) It took 2 hours to format the 200GB drive under the Disk Management console, after which it said it failed. :mad: But then, Windows was able to recognize the drive by then, so I formatted it under Windows Explorer, and that took another 2 hours.

[ribitch]

2 hours?!? good lord thats a long time.