Sunday, April 8, 2007

Right before Macworld I purchased a USB Universal drive adapter thinking it might come in handy some day. Well after trying shut down my G5 (it hung) I have to hold the power button in for 8 seconds to get it to shut off. When I restarted it several hours later my second drive would not appear on the desktop nor could it be seen by any of my recovery software. Sadly I prepared to remove it when I remembered the adapter. Keep in mind this is a cable with a power adapter and four different connectors for IDE, Serial ATA, 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch with a power supply. It does not look like much. After removing the drive from the computer I hooked up the cables to it and plugged it into my USB 2 port. Seconds later the drive mounted on my desktop where I made a backup as a just incase I need any data from the last week. After backing the drive up I decided to see if it would mount if I placed it back inside my G5. Happy to say, that it does and has been working ever since. By the way for those you are interested I did have a week old back up from this drive on another FireWire drive. In case your wondering the USB 2.0 Adapter is made by NewerTech and works with Mac, Linux, and Windows. Side note if your using a Mac that only has USB 1.1 I do not advise trying to save a 123 Gigs of data to another drive, my time using USB 2.0 took 5 hours. As a note this adapter will not work with the Seagate drives as itâo[dot accent]s power supply only pumps out 2.0 amps and the Seagate needs 2.8 amps to power up. Also of note the failing drive has again kicked the bucket as expected, and has been replaced. 12:41:07 PM    comment []