I got the USB drive boxes last night from the Fed Ex guy. I ended up ordering them from a place called Deal Sonic. They were a good price, like $21 a piece and I got 2 USB 2.0 cards for $3.99 a piece. My "server" is so old that it doesn't have USB 2.0 and I think I want the speed. Not a bad deal. So I ran down stairs and promptly screwed in my Seagates, hooked the drives to my laptop (which has USB 2.0)...
And nothing....
Windows XP recognized 'em as USB drives, even knew about the sizes, but didn't "stitch" them into the OS. Hmmm..... So I unscrewed everything and jammed the drives into another machine, straight on the IDE cables, same thing. What do you bet these guys needed to be formatted? Sure enough. But the machine that I had chose for this operation I hadn't bothered to plug in a mouse and trying to use Windows utilities without a mouse is a pain, so I loaded some Seagate utility that formatted these monsters. I was fully prepared to wait about 15 minutes a drive, based upon how long it took to reformat a 40 GB drive that I was mucking with a couple of weeks ago. But no, this Seagate thing just wailed on these drives and they both were formatted 160GB in about 2 minutes a piece! That's pretty strong.
Now this weekend I will try out these rascals and then start the install of the USB card in my trusty old PII...should be fine. Oh yea, and paint the ceiling in Kelly's room. And about 100 other little things around the house. My work is never ending.
I also bought another old PII from work today. Got a Dell PII 333 with 128mb RAM & 2 10GB drives for $25! I'm going to fire up a trusty Free BSD install. I've got this odd desire to play around with Unix again so this will satisfy this itch. Or make me want to chuck it all against the wall. We'll see.
And nothing....
Windows XP recognized 'em as USB drives, even knew about the sizes, but didn't "stitch" them into the OS. Hmmm..... So I unscrewed everything and jammed the drives into another machine, straight on the IDE cables, same thing. What do you bet these guys needed to be formatted? Sure enough. But the machine that I had chose for this operation I hadn't bothered to plug in a mouse and trying to use Windows utilities without a mouse is a pain, so I loaded some Seagate utility that formatted these monsters. I was fully prepared to wait about 15 minutes a drive, based upon how long it took to reformat a 40 GB drive that I was mucking with a couple of weeks ago. But no, this Seagate thing just wailed on these drives and they both were formatted 160GB in about 2 minutes a piece! That's pretty strong.
Now this weekend I will try out these rascals and then start the install of the USB card in my trusty old PII...should be fine. Oh yea, and paint the ceiling in Kelly's room. And about 100 other little things around the house. My work is never ending.
I also bought another old PII from work today. Got a Dell PII 333 with 128mb RAM & 2 10GB drives for $25! I'm going to fire up a trusty Free BSD install. I've got this odd desire to play around with Unix again so this will satisfy this itch. Or make me want to chuck it all against the wall. We'll see.