External 2.5 Hard Drive Enclosure

This isn't the most exciting topic, but I wanted to report another successful piece of hardware with FreeBSD. Earlier I wrote about the Adaptec DuoConnect PC Card adapter which provides my laptop with FireWire (but not USB 2.0, unfortunately). To add some external high-speed storage to my laptop, I bought a ByteCC 2.5 HDD enclosure with FireWire and USB 2.0 from XPCGear.com. I liked this model because I could buy an AC adapter with it. I could have drawn power from the laptop's single on-board USB 1.1 port, but I prefer to leave that free as the USB 2.0 ports on the Adaptec card don't work properly under FreeBSD.

Here is how a 30 GB HDD appeared in dmesg output when plugged into the Adaptec adapter using FireWire:

GEOM: create disk da0 dp=0xc3a81450

da0 at sbp0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0

da0:  Fixed Direct Access SCSI-0 device 

da0: 50.000MB/s transfers, Tagged Queueing Enabled

da0: 28615MB (58605120 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 3648C)

As this was a NTFS drive, I mounted it using mount_ntfs:

orr:/$ sudo mount_ntfs /dev/da0s1 /mnt



/dev/da0s1 on /mnt (ntfs, local)

This model also ships with a handy carrying case for the drive. The guys at XPCGear.com were very helpful, and actually answered by phone a question I posted during the checkout procedure!