[G4] Assembling a USB Drive

[Ron Steinke]

One of the criteria that you will need to keep aware of is the actual 
physical size of the drive. There are sizes from 9.5mm thick to 19.5mm. 
Some external cases will only accept certain thicknesses. Each case 
manufacturer has different construction standards and you will need to 
be sure that you purchase a size that will allow your case to close 
completely.

The capacity of the drive does not matter in this instance. I have used 
drives from 170Kb up to 30Gb in the same case and they all worked 
perfectly after formatting. As long as Apple Drive Setup recognizes the 
drive, you should have no problems regardless of the capacity drive 
that you get.

As for the data transfer speed issue, I really have not seen any 
problem with using 5400RPM drives. The data seems to transfer quickly 
enough for my needs. Perhaps other people are concerned about absolute 
speed, but I can't see that concern affecting your need. Backing up 
data and transferring files isn't that much different from actually 
creating the files in the first place and being concerned about the 
time difference between a 7200RPM and a 5400RPM drive transfer rate 
seems to be very anal-retentive to me.

On Apr 20, 2004, at 9:15 AM, John Erdman wrote:


On an impulse last night I bought on eBay a USB enclosure that is sized 
to hold 2.5" IDE harddrives. These drives of course are the size one 
uses in a Powerbook.  I want to use it for portable back up and file 
transfer.......