Hard drive dock

Vantec Dual Dock

As a part of our commitment to helping photographers manage their workflow, we are stocking the Vantec Dual Hard Drive Dock. Within the next few weeks there will be a full description as to how you should use the drive dock and appropriate Mac/Win software to backup, please check our website for this information.

The dock is designed to hold two SATA interface raw hard drives, either 2.5inch or 5.25inch drives. This is the most economical way to have an external hard drive.

We also stock the hard drives cases that allow you to safely store your raw hard drives in. The drives are 2TB 3.5inch and 600mb 2.5inch , the cases are anti-static (critical) and offer good protection with the ability to write on the case label.

The Vantec Drive Dock connects with USB2 or eSATA.

Cost of drive dock: $99.95
Cost of case: $14.85

Order by emailing or visiting the lab.

Hard drives in cases.

 

Formatting raw hard drives to use in the Vantec Drive Dock, or inside a computer.

Windows computers.

  1. Insert the drive into the dock and connect it to the USB of your computer
  2. Power on the drive dock
  3. The drive should not mount, or appear as a drive letter, it will require formatting.
  4. Go to the start menu
  5. Choose Control Panel
  6. Choose Administrative tools
  7. Choose Computer Management
  8. Under the Storage menu (left hand side), choose Disk Management
  9. Be careful, this is where you can erase your C drive!
  10. In the bottom right panel, locate the new “Disk”, it should not have a drive letter nor a format, it will be listed as “unknown” and will be numbered, “Disk 0″ will be your computer’s main hard drive, your c drive.
  11. Right click on the panel which contains the disk number and choose to initialise.
  12. The Drive will be no longer labeled as “Unknown”, but will be “Basic”
  13. Now the area to the right of the drive number is a panel that can describes the drive letters of the hard drives, right click in this area and choose to create a “New Partition”
  14. Follow the next few panes my mostly leaving the default…
  15. Choose primary drive
  16. Single parititon
  17. Assign a drive letter to suit yourself
  18. Choose to format NTFS
  19. Give the new volume a name.
  20. It is ready to use.

Mac (regular external HD use)

  1. When you insert the new raw disk in your drive dock and connect it to your mac it will automatically ask to initialise the drive, make sure it is the new blank drive you choose to format! Follow the prompts to do this.
  2. If you wish to manually initialise the new hard drive, choose “ignore” when you get the above message
  3. In the Applications folder, go to the folder utilities and choose “Disk Utility”
  4. Becareful here, by selecting the wrong disk you can erase your computers main hard drive.
  5. In disk utility, identify the new hard drive in the left panel, click on the icon of the new drive that is the closest to the left.
  6. Go to the “Erase” tab in the menu within Disk Utility, and choose the format “Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and give the new disk a name.
  7. It is now ready to use.

Mac (bootable backup)

  1. If you wish to have the drive as a bootable backup, then you need to do the following
  2. Instead of Erase, go to “Partition”
  3. Under Volume Scheme, choose 1 partition
  4. Under Options (down the bottom) choose GUID Partition Table
  5. Name it
  6. Choose Apply to erase and format the drive.

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