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III. Connecting and Formatting Hard Drives
Introduction
This section describes how to connect external hard drive enclosures and a method of
formatting your Serial ATA hard drive(s) using Apple’s
Drive Setup
utility (OS 9.XX) or
Apple’s
Disk Utility
(OS X). If you decide to use a third party drive setup utility, please refer to
the documentation provided with the utility.
Connecting the SeriTek/1VE4, or SeriTek/1eVE4 to an External Enclosure
1. The SeriTek/1VE4, or SeriTek/1eVE4 is compatible with a wide range of external
enclosures. Enclosures must meet basic requirements which include:
•
Adequate power to support the hard drives (dedicated power supply),
•
7-pin shielded receptacles compatible with FirmTek’s shielded Serial ATA cable;
See Below:
•
Support for Serial ATA Version 1.0
•
Serial ATA hard drives or Parallel ATA hard drives with compatible Serial ATA to
Parallel ATA converter
2. Install hard drives into the external enclosure according to the instructions included with
the enclosure.
3. Attach one end of FirmTek’s shielded Serial ATA cable(s) to the Serial ATA receptacle(s)
on the SeriTek/1VE4, or SeriTek/1eVE4, and connect the other end(s) to the external
enclosure.
4. Power on the external enclosure.
Note:
Macintosh computers require unique external shielded Serial ATA cables for maximum
reliability. FirmTek Serial ATA cables were specially designed to be compatible with both PC and
Macintosh computers. Please use only FirmTek external shielded Serial ATA cables with the
SeriTek/1VE4, or SeriTek/1eVE4.
Caution
: The SeriTek/1VE4 & the SeriTek/1eVE4 require different Serial ATA
cables/connectors: This is because of a new external SATA cable/connector specification
from the ATA Committee that defines a new “external” SATA connector, called eSATA
connectors.
•
The original Serial ATA (Type A SATA) connectors have an L shaped opening, See
Figure 2A.
•
The newer “eSATA” connectors have a rectangular opening, See Figure 2B..
Using SeriTek/1VE4 with SeriTek/2eEN4 requires cables have one “L shaped”
connector, and one rectangular “I shaped” eSATA connector, just like the 2
connectors shown in below Figure 2.
Figure 2: Serial ATA Connector Types: Original “L shaped” & newer eSATA “I shaped”
Figure 2A: Original
“L shaped” connector
Figure 2B: newer
rectangular eSATA
“I shaped” connector
