Techie entry time.
Most of the summer my iBook had been ticking along with precious little hard disk space remaining (<1GB out of 30GB), so in September I decided time had come to bite the bullet and sort out some external storage.
My main criteria were that the unit had to (1) use Firewire (iLink/IEE1394) to connect to my iBook; (2) was 'bus-powered' meaning I didn't have to carry around a separate power supply & (3) was as portable as possible.
This ruled out portable hard-disks built around a 3.5in drive mechanism (too bulky, most required external power supplies). Tempted by SmartDisk's Firelite drives (but put off by the high prices) I set about building my own for cheaper. A morning of googling and searching ebay later, I had ordered a firewire enclosure for £27.99 (incl. VAT & P&P) and an accompanying 2.5in 60GB Toshiba from Simply Computers for £129.84 all in. If I hadn't done a build-you-own, I'd have been looking at another £10 for a smaller 40Gb Firelite, or £60 more for an equivalent size. The enclosure is 138mm x 83mm x 20mm which is a perfect size while sporting a sleek silver finish.
Installation was simple (a couple of mouting screws to secure the hard disk on the firewire controller PCB) and formatting on Mac OS X painless. I now have a backup drive which can boot into OS X 10.2.8 (so that I can run disk utilities on the iBook internal HD), have freed the iBook of 17GB+ of music and have plenty of storage for digital photos (for when I can afford to get my hands on one).
Posted by jonah at October 21, 2003 09:37 AM | TrackBack