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February 16, 2004

External Hard-drive case installation

So I had these three WD 200GB IDE ATA 133 hard drives that I bought on Ebay for a song. I had them installed in an old desktop case running as RAID0 doing back-up for my LAN. But the old case took a digger (the fan and CPU) and fried one of the drives (the one with the OS on it of course). So I have two left and no case to put them in. So I figured to get an external case and just plug it into the USB port. It was amazingly complex. There are different drive heights, some cases support only ATA 66, not 133, some only support drives up to 80gb, some are USB 1.1 only. Now with USB 1.1 being 1mb/sec transfer and 2.0 standard 12mb/sec and USB 2.0 Hi-Speed being 440mb/sec (see all the details here) (thanks rich). After allot of searching and emailing different vendors, I settled on the Bytecc (korea) ME-720 series that "supports up to 300gb drives". $38.99 from Extreme PC Gear. Now I could have bought a pre-assembled one, external case, hard-drive and all for about $200 at Ebay, but what fun would that be?

The folks at XPCGear were nice about pointing me to the right case and shipping on-time. The fun started when I got the cases and opened the box. Try to go to the ByTecc web site. First IE asks if you want to download the Korean fonts. They don't have an English language site. No manufacturer support. The "user manual" was obviously written by someone for whom english was a second language. But all the parts were there, and I figured myself to be handy, so I started in. I started by screwing on the mounting brackets to the drive. A procedure for which the user manual doesn't spare even one page. I guess they assume you are smart enough to figure that out yourself. First problem was that in the little baggie were two different kinds of screws that were not readily obvious (nor noted in the instructions). Course thread and fine thread. nary the two shall mix. After trying to screw on a mounting bracket with a fine grain thread, I figured out that the course grain ones were for screwing things into the drive itself. The fine ones were for screwing the mounting bracket to the base of the enclosure. The factory supplied screws were flat heads and they bottomed out in the drive holes before securing the mounting brackets. So I dug up some countersunk head coarse thread screws from another mounting bracket and used those. The beveled heads did a good job of keeping the mounting bracket in place.

Having the mounting bracket on, next was plug in the drive to the case. This was straight forward since there were only two plugs, one power and one IDE of very different configuration so you couldn't confuse them. One silly thing was that the power plug came from the factory upside down from the way you mount the drive, so you have to twist the cable to get it to fit. An annoyance, but not terribly. The mounting bracket fit snugly into the enclosure base. Two more FINE thread screws later the hard disk was secured to the case. I then plugged in the power and USB cable just to see the thing power up. There is a handy power switch on the back. The drive spun and the light flicked green/red/green. All systems go. So I figured to put the rest of the case together before plugging in the drive to my computer. As I was doing it I thought it might be stupid in case there was some problem I had to get to the drive, but I was on a mission. The top half fit fine with the bottom. Then you clip on these two rails on the sides to hold them together. A front face-plate is held in place by the two side rails as well. I put mine on upside-down (with the air vents on the wrong side) but only because I wasn't looking at the picture. Not sure it really matters.

So with the drive in the case and everything assembled, I plugged in the running drive to my USB port on my IBM X20 laptop running Windows XP in it's basestation. I plugged it into a USB port on the laptop, not the base station. There are two USB ports on the base station. In one I have the Microsoft BlueTooth keyboard adaptor plugged in. In the other, I had an external CDrom. Initially when I plugged in the external hard-drive, nothing happened. I mean nothing. No "new hardware found" message from Windows. Curious I thought. I had to go upstairs and get a coffee to think this one over. During the pouring I remembered a similar situation last year trying to plug in lots of USB devices. In the end of that debacle, I figured out that when the laptop is in its docking station, it thinks the one in the laptop and one on the back of the base station are one in the same, so it only recognizes one or the other, but not both. So I unplugged the external harddrive AND the external CDROM. Then I plugged in the external harddrive into the laptop USB port (now the base station had one free port). Windows complained about a Hi-Speed USB device in a non-Hi-Speed port, but went ahead. I don't know if that means my external device is USB 2.0 Hi-Speed and the port is USB 2.0 normal or the port is USB 1.1. I haven't tested the access speed yet. Anyway getting ahead of myself. So Windows says "new hardware found" and identifies it as "USB MASS STORAGE DEVICE" as the user manual said it would (in it's one page Windows XP installation guide). God forbid I was running 98 or ME where you actually have to install drivers from the CDROM.

OK, peachy I say. The user manual says the drive will just automatically show up in "my Computer". I go to "My Computer". I have my good old faithful "C:" and nutt'n else. Hummm. In these waters the "user manual" was totally useless. I put my coffee on it. I put my glass of water on the CD of drivers. Now I couldn't remember if this drive that I was using had previously been formatted, or was fresh out of the box. I go poking around "troubleshooting" in Windows. Yes the device manager says the device is working. Driver is up to date. Through no fault of the "troubleshooting" guides nor the user manual, I remember something about Administrative Tools under the Control Panel. Where you go for defragmentation and all that stuff. Computer Management looks like the right one, so off I go. Again there is Device Manager. And my friend Disk Defragmentor. Disk Management looks promising, so down goes the mouse click. Now in this view, I see my "C:" drive on "drive0" and on "drive1" is something, but no partitions or anything. I guess this is the one which was never installed. A few more random clicks (ending in a right click) figures out how to initialize the drive. After that, it shows up as 186.4GB of unformatted storage. Now the WD site explains why a drive sold as 200GB actually only has 186.4GB of usable space, so I won't go into it here. Actually it is a small miracle that the full drive is available as there are plenty of warnings on the WD box about Windows not seeing more than 133GB of drive and how special drivers are required. No such problem here. Just gotta format it. So I set it off to format NTFS. The Format wants to assign the drive "D:" but I know my external CDROM is that, so I give it "H:".

Format goes fine. I drag and drop some files. They copy there and are fine. I don't check the speed, but it seems slow, so I think it is running at USB 1.1 speed. Gotta figure out that later. For now, the current task is done. I like the drive case and installation of the second one went WAY faster. That hard disk had already been formatted, so all I had to do was install it in the case and plug it into the USB port. It showed up as drive H: right away.

I would recommend these drive cases but only for those who like to tinker. I should have taken Johnlu's advice about not going cheap. The case is not cheap, it works fine, but the installation stuff is not designed very well. You have to tinker. Maybe a more main-stream vendor would have a better set of instructions. But I like to tinker so these enclosures are fine. I may even get some more!

Posted by Martin at February 16, 2004 12:20 PM

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Posted by: Noel at March 28, 2004 1:24 AM

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