Disk Management

The levitating saxophone.	www.professorcalle.com MUM 2600
Hard drive transfer rates Firewire 400 - IEEE 1394 (Transfer rates of up to 400 megabits per second) Firewire 800 - IEEE 1394b (Transfer rates of up to 800 megabits per second) USB 1.1 (Transfer rates of up to 12 megabits per second) USB 2.0 (Transfer rates of up to 480 megabits per second)
Digital recording external Firewire disk drive requirements: Speed: External 7200 rpm Chip: The drive must contain the Oxford 911 or 922 chip. Without these chips, the Firewire drive may not be usable for digital audio. Buffer: Quality drives will offer a memory buffer preventing data loss. Memory size: Most Firewire drives cost approximately $1 per Gigagbyte. Usually, the larger the drive, the more cost effective the drive will become due to the fact that the housing and power supplies are similar for most drives ranging from 40 to 300 Gigabytes. Another advantage of large drives is that one may partition these drives into various sectors. In effect, this creates multiple drives from a single drive. Physical Size: There are a number of excellent, affordable and small Friewire drives on the market. For many students, size and weight will be a major issue. Most drives includinng those by OWC, La Cie and Maxtor all fit comfortably in a backpack or computer bag. Please remember to keep all power cables, transformers and Firewire cables together in order to prevent lost time. Almost all Firewire drives use unique power adapters and connectors. On the other hand, Firewire cables come in 400 and 800 varieties, depending on the type of drive, and are universal as to their adaptors or connectors respectively. Selected Websites (Professor Calle recommended): Other World Computing MacMall (excellent prices and selection) ClubMac (excellent prices and selection) Tiger Direct (excellent prices and selection) Costco Sandisk (USB, SD cards and other solutions) LaCie Maxtor Fantom SmartDisk Edge Edge DiskGo (USB) Lexar Ezquest Drivers: Every drive owner should visit the drive manufacturer's website periodically in order to update drivers, software and learn about new products and technology.
Students: Please remember to save all work and then unmount the USB, Firewire or any other drives from the desktop prior to disconnecting the drives from the computer. Failure to unmount a drive(s) may cause loss of data and/or corrupt the directory structure of the hard drive making retrieval of data difficult or even impossible. Unmounting a drive on the Macintosh computer: Save all work and then simply drag the drive icon to the trash. Wait for the the drive icon to disappear from the desktop before removing the drive. Additionally, many drives contain a light that will blink while operations including writing, saving and unmounting are in progress.
What is hard disk fragmentation? When a file is saved to the hard drive, it tries to keep everything in the same location (or cluster). Over the course of time files will be deleted, leaving blank areas between files. If you install another large program, the hard drive tries to fill the holes, thus breaking up the program storage block. This effects your system performance by as much as 200% since programs have to access more areas of the hard drive, just to run.
References
RJ Davenport Internet Services. (2003). WebAppeal Hard Disk Fragmentation [Electronic version] . Retrieved January 11, 2006 from http://www.webappeal.com/directory/Tutorials/hdfrag.html