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NZ Macguide Issue 1

The circuit board that translates between the drive and the FireWire ports. The cable plugged in at the top is for CD RCA cables - you can remove this to stop it flopping around if you're not going to need it.

Plug the ribbon cable to the drive. Remember that the red ribbon edge goes to pin 1. You can mistakenly connect it backwards, so be careful: some cables have no location block on the end so, when plugging in the ribbon, check for the pin 1 location.

Attach the power connector - there's only one way to fit it.

Mount the drive using the included screws. (Time to use that screwdriver skill). Slide the covers back together and screw in the end

FireWire revolutionised mass market, high-speed data transfer - now all sorts of goodies are fitted up with the 400Mbps plugs. Unfortunately, some prices for that FireWire logo are enough to make consumers feel they're being fitted up! If you're not afraid of a screwdriver, there is a way of knocking one up without selling the farm ...

To say this went without a hitch would be lying - but we've figured out the issues and corrected them. Just follow these instructions and you should be sorted!

It is worth noting that DVD burners won't be recognised by iDVD unless they're factory-fitted SuperDrives in G4s.

Things you need

FireWire Drive Housing
Here we've used a Newmotion housing - it's a 5.25" translucent box with the stylish FireWire logo printed on top. It contains the bridge circuitry and required software, so all you do is add the hard drive. Most housings will accept any IDE device - hard disk, CD ROM, CD Burner, DVD ROM - if in doubt check with your local Mac dealer. The housing will set you back about $380+GST

Hard Disk
A 60GB SeaGate Barracuda 7200rpm with a 2Mb cache for fast access seemed like enough storage. Your favourite Mac dealer will sell you one for around $500+GST

Screwdriver
The Newmotion kit makes things simple. You don't have to be a computer engineer but you do have to know how to use a screwdriver.

Plugging it in
When you try the Firewire drive for the first time, power it up before you connect it to the Mac, and you should be able to hear the drive spin up and the fan blowing - if nothing happens, disassemble the drive and start again.

The included Newmotion CD has software for both Macintosh and Windows OS - but you'll need to have Apple's FireWire software (it's usually in your system, installed from your system CD).

To ensure things all work nicely, it does pay to download the latest FireWire drivers from www.apple.com.

Install the Newmotion FireWire utility, and restart.

Moment of truth time: Plug in your shiny new hard drive and use the Disk Control software to format and partition it. As it's a portable drive, it's worth putting password protection on at this stage - you can never be too careful with your data. You're now ready to rock - but if it doesn't, read our troubleshooting panel to solve your dramas.

FireWire Fun
Like USB, a great thing about FireWire is that you can 'hot-swap' the connection while the drive is still spinning (in the bad old days, you had to turn your Mac off, connect or disconnect, then restart!).

You can add up to 63 devices to your FireWire port on your Mac ... but anyone who does is just being silly.

Yes, FireWire has potential of 400Mbps data transfer, a very impressive number. In reality, this hard drive is an IDE drive working through a FireWire bridge converter. It's no slouch, but it won't be as fast as an internal drive on a 133MHz Bus.

Performance is relative - your machine speed, software, drive characteristics and a whole lot of other things create so many variables, bench testing is meaningless. The only thing that matters is that it will do the job and do it well.

I've used a drive like this for iMovie captures and to move large files between the iMac and my G4. On the 450MHz G4, copying a 60Mb video clip from an internal drive to the FireWire drive took 17 seconds - that's plenty fast for most Mac users' needs.

You can even boot from this mutant FireWire drive if you, of course, install a Mac OS (operating system) on it. It will be happy as Larry (who, I'm told, is very happy) on MacOS 8.6 or later.

A Worthwhile Upgrade
There's something intensely satisfying about building your own gear from parts. Aside from the satisfaction of doing something yourself, the Newmotion housing gives you a lot of flexibility. You can buy almost any IDE device, cobble it up and you're away. All in all, it's simpler and superior to SCSI, which was the old standard.

Troubleshooting
I ran the Newmotion utility program and Heat Utilities both said the drive couldn't be found: "But it's within spitting distance of my computer!" I yelled. (At this point I am starting to feel like a PC engineer installing Windows 2000), everything's plugged in, the green light on the drive is switched on. As they say, "the lights were on, but nobody's home".

The first thought was the IDE master/slave settings. The Barracuda drive comes from the factory as a master, and since this was going to be a FireWire unit, I thought I might need to switch the jumpers. There was nothing in the instructions on this but I tried it anyway. No difference. To be safe, I put the drive jumpers back so the drive is configured as a master device.

When All Else Fails...
RTFM (read the fabulous manual). It said you need to power on the drive and computer, then connect the FireWire cable. I powered everything down, disconnected the FireWire cable, powered everything back up, connected the cable and sure enough, I could hear the drive making searching sounds. Of course, the drive hadn't been formatted for the Mac OS, so it didn't show up on the desktop. I launched the Disk Control program and it found the drive.

I formatted the drive with a single partition of 60Gb - actually you can never format a drive to it's full capacity due to the block sizes - 1k = 1024 bytes so 60GB will format to about 56GB. Yes, it would appear that sometimes I can be too clever for my own good!

More tools
These are a host of drivers available for FireWire out there on the net. Your safest bet is to use the ones supplied with your housing. Failing that, I recommend you download Heat Utilities from www.macpitstop.com - Heat claims a 20% speed increase and is free to download, but you have to register first.

© Parkside Media 2002
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