Accusys 7500 - Hot Swap RAID Device :: Installation

01-22-2002 · Category: Hardware - Hard Drives

By Niso Levitas

Do you know how to install a hard drive or a CD Drive? That is all you have to know to install this product into two available 5-¼ external drive bays of your PC. Plug in the power and Ultra DMA 100 cable and that's it! You can even connect this device as a slave to any drive. Master/Slave selection is easily adjustable by a jumper like all IDE drives.

To install the hard drive, take out the tray and put your disk inside. Then push it back. For plugging and unplugging the power cable, you have to be careful. Power cable connections to the PCB are not so durable. And one more point. All hard drives will fit to tray connector, except Western Digital drives. WD drives connector places are not standard. A manufacturer representative told us there are special models for WD drives.

After placing the tray back to its place, you'll use the key provided in the package to power up the drive. This is necessary for secure power up or hot swap operations. When you boot up, system recognizes this device as a disk. A disk with the same size you put in the tray.

Then you may continue to normal operation. Either you start with your OS Installation CD and partition the drive, or FDISK and FORMAT in DOS. I tried both without any hassle. There is just one problem. When you place a second new drive before boot up, sometimes it gets stuck in the beginning of the boot screen. When the system starts the OS, you may hot plug the second drive, and let it clone the first drive. After cloning boot-up problems disappear.