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Have Disc, Do you have an old hard disc drive lying in a cupboard somewhere, unused and unloved? Here’s a way to put it to good use for next to nothing and perhaps give you the flexibility you’ve always dreamed about! By ROSS TESTER A RECENT JAYCAR advertise- ment in SILICON CHIP caught our eye be­ cause it appeared that it might solve a couple of problems we were having transporting very large files between two remote computers. And it did! But first, our problem. As you probably realise, SILICON CHIP and its sister magazine ZOOM are produced entirely on com­puter. The first time the printer sees any part of these maga­ zines is as finished computer files. Unfortunately, those files, particularly a colour page, can easily be fifty megabytes (50Mb) or more. We have used a number of methods to transport these files to the printers. We’ve “modemed” them (is there such a word?) but that’s really only feasible The “Mobile Rack” comes in two versions, one for IDE drives and the other for SCSI drives. It’s just the shot for transferring large amounts of data from one computer to another, or for taking a backup copy of valuable office data home with you at night. 4  Silicon Chip for relatively small files – large files simply take too much time. The most usual method is to copy the files to 88Mb Syquest discs and to send these to the printer. However, after years of faithful service our Syquest drive was starting to become less than 100% reliable and, in any case, 88Mb is no longer really big enough. It needed replacement. Will Travel Step 1: remove the faceplate covering a spare drive bay. But which way to go? Take a look at a typical computer products catalog and you’ll see that a myriad of portable storage devices is now available. Along with Syquest drives (themselves now available in at least four different configurations), there are high capacity floppies, magneto-optical drives, Zip drives, Jaz drives, Syjet drives and recordable CD-ROM drives (some now re-writable) – to name but a few. Would you believe that there’s even one called a Shark? Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. We’ll look at a few. Zip drives are now quite popular. The discs are cheap but they only hold 100Mb – not much more than our old Syquest discs. The Jaz drive, the Zip’s “big brother”, is much better in this regard – up to a gigabyte per disc. However, the drives and discs are still relatively expensive and not, as yet, particularly common. And of course, both Zip and Jaz discs (like Syquests) can be erased by stray magnetic fields – so that’s a negative. Step 2: plug the data cable into the socket on the frame. High capacity (120Mb) floppy disc drives are now available. Backward-compatible with the old faithful but now-almost-useless 3.5-inch floppy disc, they will probably catch on but as yet they’re almost unheard of. They’re also pretty expensive (about $350 for the drive and $70 for the discs compared to about $40-$50 for a 1.44Mb floppy drive and cents for the discs!). Magneto-optical drives looked like a pretty good bet for a while. Robust and unaffected by magnetic fields, the discs hold up to 640Mb but they are also expensive and much less common than most other storage devices. Alas, we bought an MO drive some time ago but very few others did. It’s an orphan! How about CD-ROM – both the recordable variety and the new re-recordable units? Yes, they’re very attractively priced (the drives and the CDs themselves have dropped dramatically in price in the past year, perhaps due to supply and demand but just as likely because a new standard – DVD – has arrived). Of course, there is no problem in anyone else reading a CD because just about every PC made in the last couple of years has a CD-ROM drive built in. CDs are also quite robust and unaffected by magnetic fields. We also purchased a CD-ROM writer and have used this very successfully. The one big drawback is time: you can’t easily add files to a CD-ROM as you can, say, to a hard disc or a Syquest disc. And where large amounts of data are involved, it can take more than an hour to test, write and verify the CD. Sometimes that’s an hour we can’t spare when the presses are waiting! So you can see, the decision is not at all simple. Or at least it wasn’t until we spotted a rather interesting item in the aforementioned Jaycar advert. Mobile rack The item advertised was a “Mobile Rack”, or removable hard disc carrier and frame for $39.95. As the name sugOctober 1997  5 Step 3: plug a spare power cable into the power socket. Use a Y-adaptor if you don’t have any spare power cables. manded!). What was a perfectly good hard disc drive a couple of years ago, with a capacity of 100Mb or 200Mb, has become today’s paperweight. A quick search soon turned up a couple of old IDE hard discs sitting in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet (mainly ‘cos no-one had the heart to throw out a perfectly good hard disc! But then again, I still have my first-ever 20Mb MFM drive in a cupboard at home. Call me a sentimentalist if you will). Anyway, we reasoned, what if we resurrected one of these IDE discs and used it one of these frames? For less than forty bucks, our problems could be solved. (Naturally, we would also have to convince our printers to make the same huge investment). Knowing only too well our file transfer problems, which of course were also their problems, they baulked at spending such a princely sum for only a millisecond or two. And then our file transfer problems were over! Here’s how we did it, how they did it, and how you can do it too. Even if it’s only to take work home at night that you should have finished during the day, this little device is a gem! Fitting the disc drive Step 4: carefully slide the frame into the drive bay. gests, the device is designed to allow any standard size 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch disc drive (half height or less), which would normally be mounted inside a computer, to be made removable. The frame comes in two types, one to suit standard IDE hard disc drives and the other to suit SCSI drives. There are two very obvious uses for such a device. The first is file security and we’ll have more to say on this a little later. The second is to allow 6  Silicon Chip the computer’s hard disc drive to be transported from one computer to another, allowing files, programs and so on to be transported. Aha! Exactly what we were looking for! But did we really have to use one of the hard disc drives in our computers? Why not another one altogether? Like most computer users, we have upgraded our hard disc drives many times as our needs increased (no, make that read as the programs we use de- Before doing anything with the drawer, have a good look at your disc drive. Make a note of its type number and any informa­tion printed on it – especially such information as its size and the number of cylinders, heads, sectors, landing zones, precom­press­ ion and so on. If this information isn’t printed on your drive (and on many older drives it may not be), you will need to find it out – either from the manufacturer’s data sheet which came with the drive, from the distributor, a friendly computer techie (who will probably have one of those handy programs which list hard disc drive parameters) or – if you have access to it - the manufactur­er’s web site on the Internet. And while you’re about it, you will also need to find out about the various jumper settings that are applicable to the drive. The jumpers are normally changed by moving a small header onto various sets of pins. These may be mounted on the disc drive PC board itself or they may be elsewhere on the drive. You may or may not need to change a jumper: if this is the only drive in your computer and you are simply making it port­able, you won’t have to bother. It would have been set as a “master” – keep it that way. However, if you are adding another IDE drive to your com­puter, it will probably need to be set as a “slave”. Each drive brand and even types within a brand differ in the way this is done. Finally, if fitting a SCSI drive, you really do need to refer to the manufacturer’s data for the correct settings (see separate panel). Once the jumpers are selected or checked, put the drive aside for a moment. Slide the drawer from the frame and remove its top and bottom metal covers. At first glance, there appears to be no easy way to do this because there are no screws but all you have to do is gently prise the cover off the drawer (even a fingernail will do it). Inside the drawer, you will find a little bag of screws, the front lock keys and a bag of silica gel which says “do not eat” (so don’t – but remember to dispose of it where the littlies won’t get at it either!). You will also see two cables – a flat ribbon data cable and a 4-pin power cable. In 99.9% of circum­stances, they are the only connections needed. Connect the cables to the drive before placing the drive into the drawer – it’s much easier. You will note a red stripe along one edge of the data cable – this is pin 1 (usually, but not always, marked on the disc drive PC board). In nearly all cases, the drive will mount the right way up (ie, PC board to the bottom), with the data cable the right way around. Next, fit the power cable. It is usual for the red lead of the power cable to be closest to the red lead of the data cable; in any case, the plug and socket are keyed which make getting it the wrong way around quite difficult. (Note that we said diffi­cult, not impossible: forcing the cable in the wrong way around will have a briefly spectacular effect as your drive makes its way to hard disc heaven with a puff of smoke and that rather horrible smell of money burning!). Now ease your hard disc drive into the drawer. Older style half height drives are a tight fit, newer low profile drives are easier. Move the drive backwards and forwards until its mounting holes line up with the Step 5: secure the frame in the drive bay using the mounting screws supplied. mounting holes in the drawer. Using the screws supplied secure the drive to the drawer. Finally, pop the top and bottom covers back on – and that part is finished. Mounting the carrier frame This step is virtually identical to fitting a standard hard disc drive to a PC. If you haven’t done that before, the steps are as follows (obviously we don’t have to tell you to turn off your computer and remove its cover!): • Select a suitable drive bay. It will need to accept a stan­dard 5-25-inch half-height disc drive and it will need to be close enough to the first, or master, disc drive to connect to the second socket on the data cable. If you find your data cable has only one socket, you’re up for a new data cable. Don’t worry, they’re cheap! Also note that either socket can be used for either hard disc drive, so if you have to swap the connector over to make it reach, no problem. • Remove the faceplate covering the chosen drive bay. This faceplate Should you use an old hard disc drive? W HILE WE HAVE talked about resurrecting an old drive, there are a few points to keep in mind. Old drives are quite possibly poorer performers than to­ d ay’s drives, so you might find that disc-intensive tasks take a little longer to do. However, we don’t see that as too much of a problem. We’ve already mentioned possible incompatibility problems. That’s for you to discover all for yourself (lucky you!). The area of most concern is that the drive might be worn out (or close to it). With the price of hard discs today a tiny fraction of what they were a few years ago, you might find that it is a lesser risk to invest in a new drive, particularly if important information is to be stored on it. There are some real bargain drives around – one or two gigabyte drives for just a couple of hundred dollars or so! Having said that, there is still a case for using an old drive. If it spins up properly when it’s turned on (ie, the bear­ings aren’t shot), if it doesn’t report loads of bad sectors, if it doesn’t make a ghastly scratching sound when you turn it on or off (ie, the heads aren’t contacting the disc surface), and if you can run Scandisk or Checkdisk and get a clean bill of health after the full surface scan, then go ahead and use it. Perhaps, though, there is even more of a case for updating your current drive to a new higher-capacity model and using the old one as the transportable! October 1997  7 Step 6: fit the disc drive to the drawer and fit the top and bottom covers. You can leave the covers off if they foul the drive – see text. Step 7: slide the drawer with the disc into the frame and push it all the way home so that it mates with the socket on the carrier. is usually plastic (occasionally metal) and either pops out or has screws holding it in place. Sometimes, though, there is a metal plate which needs to be unscrewed or broken away from the main case (the latter is occasionally used on “tower” cases which have a separate, removable front panel). • Check to see if you have a spare power cable fitted with a large 4-pin white plastic plug. If you don’t, you will need to buy a “Y” adaptor – a 8  Silicon Chip power cable with a socket and two plugs. These are readily available but prices vary enormously. We nor­ mally pay about $5 for these but some stores have asked us, unsuccessfully of course, for $24.95 each! To fit this, simply remove the same type of power plug from some other device (eg, a floppy drive), plug this into the Y adaptor socket and push one of the plugs back into the device you just took it from. The other plug, naturally, goes to the mobile rack frame. • Carefully push the data cable socket onto its mating plug on the frame. Remember that the red stripe goes to pin 1 (clearly marked on the back of the frame). Check that you have the socket cor­rectly mated otherwise the drive won’t work. • Now it’s time to slide the frame into its correct position in the drive bay, so that the front of the frame is flush with the front of the computer case or with other drives. Most drive bays have long slots in them to allow you to accurately position the frame. Install two screws on each side to hold it in place and nip the screws up firmly. It is important that you don’t skimp on the screws here because the sides of the frame need to be held rigidly in position so that the drawer slides in and out proper­ly. If your drive bay is the type that uses sliders which clip into place (as on one of our computers), you have no choice but to use them but these can cause a bit of a problem. The pressure of the spring clips causes the edges of the frame to flex in­wards, making it difficult to fit the drawer. However, the drawer will slide in with a little jiggling and juggling! • Slide the drawer containing the disc drive into the bay to check that it fits correctly. If you find that it is too tight a fit, perhaps because you are using an older drive which is a tight fit in the drawer, it is perfectly acceptable to use the drive without its top and bottom covers. You might be sacrificing a little disc protection when it is outside the computer but you will save the vertical space. The drive would probably be happier working without covers anyway – it would stay cooler, although the covers are well ventilated. • Make a final check to ensure you haven’t dislodged any other cables – it’s very easy to do, particularly when working in confined spaces and especially so with easily removed cables such as on floppy drives. Setting up the drive If you are simply making the only drive in your machine removable then you won’t have any setting-up to do, because electrically nothing’s chang­ed. But if you’re adding another drive, as we did, it’s a slightly different story. And it also depends on the age of your computer. On a modern computer with a “Plug‘n’Play” BIOS and Windows 95, you may find that the disc is auto detected when you turn the computer on. Watch the screen carefully before the Windows 95 sign-on screen appears. Even if that doesn’t work, many new computers have an option in the CMOS Setup to auto detect hard discs (see below). Try it! On an older computer (eg, a 486 or older), you’re going to have to tell it that you’ve changed the disc by going into the CMOS setup just after you turn the machine on. With most ma­ chines, you will probably get a message such as “Press DEL to enter setup” not too long after the machine is turned on. Even older machines such as 386s and earlier (what – you’re still using one?) were not quite so standardised. Watch the screen or refer to your manual to see which keys you need to press to enter setup. Control +, Alt +, Control Escape and Alt Escape were often used but there were others! When you enter Setup you are usually presented with a range of options. The one you want is typically the first one: “Stan­dard CMOS Setup”. Press enter and next you will see a warning screen threatening you with mortal injuries if you dare to make any adjustments. Ignore it! The next screen shows you what the computer believes is fitted – for example, a 3.5-inch “A” drive, a 5.5inch “B” drive and a 980Mb “C” drive (hard disc) but with nothing listed for hard drive “D” (the new removable drive). You must manually change the “D” drive parameters to that of the hard disc you’ve just fit­ted. Where do you get those parameters? That’s why we had you write them down before! Note that the arrow keys get you to where you want on the screen, while page up and page down modify the parameters. You will need to change drive “D” to a type 47, the option which allows you to manually enter parameters. Enter the parameters asked for, except for the size. Setup works this out for you and you should check this to confirm that you listed everything else correctly. This done, follow any instructions on the screen to leave the setup area (you typically press the “Escape” key) and return to the opening CMOS setup screen. This time, select the option which writes SCSI – What Does It Mean? as “scuzzi”) SCSI (pronounced stands for Small Com- puter Systems Interface and is a very popular method of connecting peripherals to a PC. Apart from its speed (the latest SCSI disc drives are very fast), it has the advantage of being device independent – you can connect up to seven SCSI devices on the one cable without having to worry about what those devices are. You could have a scanner, tape backup, a hard disc or two, CDROM reader or writer and so on in the chain. As long as each device has its own unique identification, the system can cope with it. The devices can be internal or external and are simply “daisy chained” from one to the next. External devices have the luxury of being removable. As long as the cabling is properly terminated at either end, you can remove SCSI devices from the system at will. One advantage SCSI drives have over standard (IDE) drives is that it is very easy to assign new drive letters to the drives, particularly under Windows 95 and Windows NT. If you have a Plug‘n’Play BIOS , your PC won’t tie itself in knots when you remove an IDE drive. However, it can be mentally flexing, to say the least, to try to remember what drive is what because the operating system automatically assigns the next letter of the alphabet to the next drive it finds. With SCSI drives, though, you can change the drive letter to any letter of the alphabet (except, of course, those already is use). If you make your SCSI disc drive “X”, for example, it will stay drive X. You set the drive letter through the setup to CMOS memory (probably something like “Write to CMOS and exit”). You will need to reboot the computer for the changes to take effect. Once done, check to see that everything works as intended. (If you enter the CMOS setup again, just for a “looksee”, you should find that “D” drive the Control Panel. To do this, double-click System, select Device Manager, click on the hard disc you want to change and check the “removable drive” box. The system will now allow you to change the drive letter by entering the same (wanted) drive letter in the start and end reserved drive letter boxes. When you reboot, the drive will have that drive letter. That’s one of the advantages. The downside is that most SCSI devices, especially hard disc drives, are significantly more expensive than equiv­alent IDE drives. One point to note about SCSI is that it requires proper termination: the devices on the ends of the chain need to be terminated, either physically with a terminator or via a DIP switch on the device PC board (some devices may use software termination). If they aren’t terminated, operation is at best unreliable (usually it won’t work at all) and if the wrong devic­es are terminated, those following on the chain have little chance of working. Just remember that the SCSI controller card is itself a SCSI device and if it is at the end of the SCSI cable (eg, if you have all internal or all external SCSI devices), it must be terminated just like the SCSI device at the other end of the cable. If you have a mixture of internal and external SCSI devic­es, the card is simply another SCSI device on the cable and must not be terminated. SCSI devices have a reputation (only partially deserved) for requiring more setting up than, say, IDE disc drives. Typi­cally, a SCSI controller card needs to be fitted and drivers loaded to run that card. Once installed, though, a SCSI system is very reliable and easy to use. is now listed. You can then exit the CMOS setup without changing anything by selecting the “Do Not Write to CMOS and Exit” option. It sounds like double dutch but that’s the one you want). What if it doesn’t work? Woops! Something’s wrong – an October 1997  9 How Many Drives Can you Fit? O N OLDER (most 486 or earlier) machines, only two IDE drives can be fitted – one as a primary, the other as a slave. If your computer is a modern type (ie, Pentium or equivalent), you can normally run up to four IDE hard discs. Two can be run in the normal “master/slave” arrangement we have talked about here on the “Primary IDE Port” and another two can be similarly run on the “Secondary IDE Port”. On a Pentium, the portable drive could be fitted as either the Primary Master (if it is the only drive) or, error message such as “HDD or controller failure” usually means that the parameters are incor­rect or that the cable or jumper is wrong. Try going back into the CMOS Setup and telling the computer you don’t have a “D” drive and see if that removes the error message. If it does, you have a problem with the drive. Check its connections or jumpers and if these are OK, check the drive parameters. If you don’t get any joy, tell CMOS you have no hard disc drives and try booting from a bootable floppy - just to start eliminating possibilities. You might have accidentally dislodged the floppy disc cable for example, or replaced the cable incor­rectly if you had to temporarily remove it. If your computer used to work with one hard disc but now doesn’t work with two, restore it to what it was (ie, disconnect the new drive) and try booting again. If it doesn’t work, the chances are pretty good that you have dislodged a cable. Go back over all the cables and the changes you’ve made – a common fault is when power cables are not pushed in far enough, especially a plug and socket (eg, the ”Y” adaptor). Systematically eliminate possibilities and you should find the fault. If a known good drive simply refuses to work, you could have incompatibility problems. This mainly occurs with older drives. There have been many cases when a drive will not work with a certain model (or models) of another brand and yet will work with other models or brands. 10  Silicon Chip assuming a two drive system, the Primary Slave OR the Secondary Master. Note that most CD-ROM drives these days are also an IDE device and may take the place of a hard disc drive. They are jumpered as master or slave in exactly the same way as a hard disc. If you have an older machine and wish to run two disc drives and a CD-ROM drive, the easiest way to do it is to buy a sound card with an IDE CD-ROM driver. They cost very little (from about $50) and give you sound capability as well as freeing up one of your IDE ports. In some cases, a drive combination might not work on one computer but the same setup will work fine on another computer. Fortunately, disc drive incompatibilites are fairly rare these days but it can occasionally be a problem if using an old drive! What if you want to use the computer and the drive is elsewhere? In a modern computer, this won’t matter unless, of course, the drive is the only one in which case you’re up the proverbial creek! Yes, it will probably give you an error message saying that the drive is not there – just say thank you very much and keep working! In the case of computers which auto detect, it will auto detect that there is nothing there and continue on its merry way. Next time you plug the drive in, it will auto detect that it is back again (naturally, you’d never think of removing or inserting the drive with the computer power on, would you?). Note that these comments only apply if the disc drive is the same type, master or slave, on both computers. If you want to change from being a master drive on one computer to a slave drive on another, you will almost definitely have to change the jumper to suit. Security Using the mobile rack also has major pluses as far as security of information is concerned. If you handle sensitive or valuable information, you would be aware of the problems in ensuring that only your eyes see it! Even worse, industrial espionage is on the increase and we’ve all heard the horror stories about hackers getting in to company information. With the Mobile Rack, when you go home at night, the whole hard disc can go home with you. No-one, not even the world’s best hacker, can open up your files if they aren’t there! Even if you don’t have this type of problem, you should have a backup copy of your company data off site. The mobile rack makes it delightfully simple because as far as the computer is concerned, the hard disc it contains is just that – another hard disc that can be copied to. When the backup is done you simply remove it for safe storage. Looking at the other side of the coin for a moment, what about the security of the hard disc itself? Doesn’t making it removable make it easier to steal? Thankfully, the makers of the mobile rack are one step ahead: they’ve included a keyed lock which holds the frame (and therefore the disc drive) firmly in place. To remove, simply turn the key and withdraw it. Be warned, though – just like all those millions of disc boxes out there which secretaries around the world dutifully lock up each night, it would appear that one key fits all. So if you have a really determined thief . . . (nah, forget it: if he’s that determined he’d simply knock off the whole damn SC computer, anyway!). Where To Buy the HDD Carrier & Frame The “Mobile Rack” (or removable hard disc carrier & frame) is available from any Jaycar Electronics store. It comes in two versions: (1) Cat. XC-4670 for IDE drives; and (2) Cat. XC-4671 for SCSI drives. Both versions cost $39.95. For further information, contact Jaycar Electronics, 8-10 Leeds St, Rhodes, NSW 2130. Phone (02) 9743 5222; fax (02) 9743 2066.