Chris Curtis dot Org

I received my hard drive today.  As I’ve mentioned, I’ve never purchased a hard drive before, but I have swapped them from machine to machine and built a PC from scratch, so I’m certainly familiar with the installation process.

Apple gets a fabulous grade in this category from me, for the reasons that follow.  The case design could not be better.  It’ll help if you open this picture and follow along.  First off, the side panel comes off with great ease.  That switch you see on the back of the computer is a lever that moves the locking tabs free and the side comes away.  There’s a polycarbonite air flow director that covers the entire open portion that you may have seen in other pictures.  It comes away along with the side.

Ok, see on the top right?  Those are the two hard drive bays, the one on top already occupied from the factory.  Directly to the left of the hard drive bays, in front of the hard drive fans you can see a little vertical plastic panel.  Set in it are four channel screws.  You take them out of the case, and stick them onto your new hard drive.  That allows it to slide into the curved drive bay channels, keeping proper spacing between the hard drives and the case.  Then the little tab on the right rotates down to secure the hard drive further.

Now here’s the ultra cool part (to me).  No cables.  Well, technically, they’re already in the case, routed inside the frame.  The data and power blade-style connectors pivot up from the case and onto the hard drive’s controls.  This image shows an open case with the second hard drive installed, and you can see what I’m talking about.  The two small black things on the lower left of the second hard drive.  So then you just close up the case and get back to business.

When you boot, the OS tells you that you have inserted a disc that contains no formatting information, and proceeds to open Disk Utility and asks you which format you want to use:  Mac OS Extended (Journaled / non-Journaled), Unix, DOS, etc.  There are options for zeroing the disc and whatnot, but I did a basic erase/format, and approximately 3 seconds later I had doubled my storage space.  Sweet.

I know that many of these facets are not exclusive to Apple, but I don’t recall seeing anything so well designed from the ground up.  I mean, including the four screws, and sticking them in the case waiting for you is cool enough.  I hate plastic baggies.  But the whole process was just very cool.

Posted Monday March 1, 2004 in Interesting by Derek Jones

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