My New Toy, A review of a Hard Drive Drawer

                    by William McCole

Having had trouble with lack of Hard Disk space in the past, I
had invested in an Iomega Zip Drive. Having thought this a great
idea, I used it for about 6 months, but soon discovered that,
since I had the parallel port version, the transfer rate was
very slow. After considering a recordable CD drive, and
rejecting it through cost (poor student etc etc), I was at a
loss.

One of my friends was transferring data files to my computer
(about 70 Megabytes worth) and we were zip compressing it using
WinZip and spanning it (writing the zip files onto a load of
floppy discs). We gave up about disc 56 (after the best part of
an hour) and decided to use his second hard drive. After copying
the files to it and removing it, he drove me home and I plugged
it in my PC. The file transfer took under 5 minutes. I was
astounded by this. In my experience Hard drives sat there inside
the computer and whirred. Taking them out was like removing your
brain to see if it was still working. Great in theory but a
potentially fatal experience. This set me thinking...

I decided to visit my local PC dealer and buy a second Hard
Drive. I already had a 2 gigabyte one, so I wanted one about
that size again. When I got there, I was ambling around the shop
and discovered a hard drive drawer. Intrigued, I examined it
further. The package consists of a mounting that fits in a
5 1/4" drive bay, a removable drawer, and a pair of keys to lock
the drawer in place. Since it was only œ13, I decided that this
would solve a lot of problems in fitting, and bought it. I also
got a pair of second hand drives, one 342 MB and one 270 Mb.

Getting home, the bay was quickly installed. Fortunately my Hard
drive cable had an extra set of connectors, so the data cable
was easy to connect. I also has a spare power cable (it uses the
same connector as the CD drive and my original hard drive). The
bay was easily to install, and I relished the speed and power I
would soon have, connected the 342Mb hard drive to the
appropriate cables in the drawer, dropped it in, inserted the
drawer and locked it in place (apparently to prevent someone
removing the drive once it is in use, with obvious
consequences). I turned on the computer...

And nothing happened. It booted fine, and ignored my second
drive.

I ummed and ahhed, removed drawer and tried again, without the
drawer it booted fine, with the drawer it threw a major wobbly
(drive not responding errors abound!). I decided that the drive
was knackered, and tried the other one...

With the same results.

After about 2 hours screaming, cursing, pleading and crying, I
phoned Jim, the PC dude. The conversation went roughly along
these lines.


"Plugged everything in?"
"Yup!"
"Checked the drive?"
"Yup!"
"Checked the jumpers?"
"huh?"
"There should be a double row of pins somewhere, probably the
back, with a bit of plastic around two of the pins, move it
along 1 column."
"Ok..."
"It'll work now."

And it did. What I had done was to have both drives set up as
Primary Master drives. For obvious reasons the computer balked
at this, by moving the little bit of plastic I has set the
'drawer drive' as the Primary Slave. This solved all the
problems, and I now had two working drives without even moving
my original.



The drawer system is very handy, relatively high capacity
(depending on drive size), and very fast access and retrieval
rates. If you are sharing your computer (if you do that!) then
each user can have a drive and keep their data separate. If you
have friends with it, data sharing is easy. The possibilities
are almost infinite. Add to that the fact that it takes both 3.5
and 2.5 inch Hard drives, it's wonderful!

The only troubles I have found is that occasionally the drawer
tries to escape, and you may have to just give it a little push
back in.... I blame the little people in My PC myself ::P

The only other problem was that it assigned itself as drive D.
moving my Zip drive to E and CD drive to F: This resulted in
some CD based programs (such as MS Publisher) getting a bit
confused, but I edited the configuration file and changed
drives.


I would definitely recommend this piece of kit to anyone needing
either more space, space with fast access, or a new gizmo. It's
well worth it.

As a footnote, I also saw the same thing in a shop in Aberdeen,
they were selling it for œ34.99 though. It pays to shop around.
::)

William McCole, 22 June 1998










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