Saturday, August 10, 2002
Adding external devices the easy way
Posted by Jason Dunn in "OFF-TOPIC" @ 02:24 PM
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004Y2P5/jasonsego
In my continuing quest to find useful tools for the book, I had requested a few items from ADS Technology. One of them was an external drive kit. The concept is that you can plug a hard drive in and it will bridge to your computer over Firewire. I didn't really clue in until I got it that you could add ANY sort of drive - CD/R, DVD-R, etc. Brilliant!
I was at Costco today, and they had the Panasonic LF-D321U (search for the lowest price) DVD burner there. What makes this drive interesting is that it supports DVD-R like the Pioneer A04, but it also supports DVD-RAM burning for data archiving. I wasn't sure how these two pieces of hardware would interact with my PC, but it worked like a charm. I mounted the DVD-R drive easily in the ADS case, plugged it into my laptop via an Adaptec PCMCIA Firewire adaptor, and I was off. Windows XP identified the DVD-RAM drive, and as I write this the 4.7 gig DVD-RAM disk is formatting in FAT32 format so I can use it like a hard drive. The entire process was smooth and painless.
What a beautiful, beautiful thing.
In my continuing quest to find useful tools for the book, I had requested a few items from ADS Technology. One of them was an external drive kit. The concept is that you can plug a hard drive in and it will bridge to your computer over Firewire. I didn't really clue in until I got it that you could add ANY sort of drive - CD/R, DVD-R, etc. Brilliant!
I was at Costco today, and they had the Panasonic LF-D321U (search for the lowest price) DVD burner there. What makes this drive interesting is that it supports DVD-R like the Pioneer A04, but it also supports DVD-RAM burning for data archiving. I wasn't sure how these two pieces of hardware would interact with my PC, but it worked like a charm. I mounted the DVD-R drive easily in the ADS case, plugged it into my laptop via an Adaptec PCMCIA Firewire adaptor, and I was off. Windows XP identified the DVD-RAM drive, and as I write this the 4.7 gig DVD-RAM disk is formatting in FAT32 format so I can use it like a hard drive. The entire process was smooth and painless.
What a beautiful, beautiful thing.
