power for ext. firewire drives

[Ivan Drucker]

Don't know if this will be of much use, but for those who have 
Cardbus-enabled their 2400's and have iPods...

I recently bought a FireWire enclosure designed for laptop drives, since 
I have a few lying around and no convenient way to use them with my iBook 
(and taking apart an iBook makes taking apart a 2400 look like opening a 
G4 desktop). It was quite cheap actually, $28 at Super PC Parts ( 
http://www.superpcparts.com/item.jsp?itemID=2083 ).

Anyway, I decided to use the drive with my 2400, and discovered that I 
couldn't -- no bus power from the PC card, and the drive doesn't come 
with an AC adapter (though it does come with an adapter to draw power 
from the keyboard port on a PC laptop, and I suppose the end could be 
changed to draw from ADB instead...)

Anyway, it occurred to me that the iPod power adapter provides bus power 
and that's all. Just for laughs, I plugged it into the free FireWire port 
on the rear of the enclosure, and the drive whirred right to life and 
showed up on my desktop. Cool.

Copying stuff is SO much faster than with my old 16-bit PC card MCE 
enclosure.

Ivan.