Things to do with a removable FireWire drive enclosure

Mar 10, '03 09:10:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

This does not really fit anywhere in your categories but I have found it incredibly useful. By getting an external 5¼" Firewire box that's capable of taking an IDE CD ROM, and fitting a removable drive sled system to it, I am now able to:

  1. Have a perfect system for diagnostics, by simply removing the drive from another machine, dropping it into a carrier, and throwing it in the FW enclosure. After powering it up, I can now run all of my utilities on that drive, with no need to reboot!

  2. Have multiple drives that I can swap in/out. I use one drive for video editing, another for an OS9/OSX boot drive, another where I "play" with OSX, experimenting with X11 and trying some of these hints on a system I can afford to scrap, etc.
All of this takes about 30 second to swap. I understand that OS X should also cope with an XP drive, but I have yet to test this. I can make a backup of the drive onto a CD/DVD and not have to worry about software and drivers, as they are all on my machine which is kept up to date.

This idea is not mine, I 'stole' it from a friend David Chisholm who is an Apple service Tech, I owe him a ton of favours for this.

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