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I just bought a Seagate ultra ata/100 HD to put in an external drive enclosure and I'm not sure about the master/slave jumper settings. I will be using it for additional storage and backups, not a replacement for my main internal drive.

The enclosure uses USB/firewire for interface. Since the drive won't be on the IDE bus, do I set the jumpers for master/single, or slave? Either makes sense to my limited knowledge, depending on the perspective. (I've looked around online, but all the information I've found is for internal installation on the IDE bus.)

This box is a mac, if that makes any difference. (I plan on keeping the internal drive as my boot /primary drive, but macs can boot from slave drives if needed.)

Set the jumpers to Master since the drive will be the master drive in the enclosure.

I would try setting it as a master first, that's what I had to do with my Maxtor in an external cradle connected via USB.

The HDD shouldn't be damaged if you did need to set the jumper setting to slave.

phongn wrote:Set the jumpers to Master since the drive will be the master drive in the enclosure.

That made the most sense to me, but I wanted to ask, given that an ounce of assumption can equal a pound of headache!

Robin wrote:[...]
The HDD shouldn't be damaged if you did need to set the jumper setting to slave.

Good. I was more worried about jacking up my drives and spending the day in drive recovery.


Thanks for the input, both!

The worst thing that could happen is that the drive wouldn't be recognized. In any case I doubt that it would make any difference (as long as it wasn't set to master w/ slave).


Edit: I would just like to point out that I have been wrong in the past.