System Integration Tips
Configuring Your Hard Drives
Your computer needs at least one hard drive. It could be a
- fixed hard drive or a
- hard drive installed in a removable cartridge.
If you only need one hard drive
Our base configuration gives you a 3.5" form factor Serial ATA hard drive with 7200 RPM spindle speed and 8 MB buffer memory. It can be installed in a 3.5" drive bay and used as a fixed hard drive, or it can be install in a removable cartridge as part of of a mobile rack assembly.
Mobile Rack - removable storage offers the advantage of data portability
In a mobile rack installation, a 5.25" form-factor cradle is installed in one of the 5.25" drive bays. The cradle is connected to the hard drive interface on the motherboard, and it also provides the mechanical and electrical interface for a removable cartridge that houses a 3.5" hard drive. When the cartridge is inserted, the cradle reads/writes to the hard drive in the cartridge. When the cartridge is extracted from the cradle, you attach an external AC/DC adapter power supply to power the hard drive and use it's USB (or SATA/ATA) interface to connect to another computer.
By attaching different interface cables, the mobile rack (cartridge cradle) can interface to a computer via either USB 2.0 or 1.1, Firewire or iLink, CardBus or PCMCIA, Serial ATA or any future interface standard. Since the media inside the cartridge is a standard hard drive, you'll never be restricted to using proprietary storage media such as ZIP, REV, SuperDisk.
