[PLUG] Using an external drive enclosure -- What am I missing?

[m0gely]

John Jason Jordan wrote:

> Just a super wild-ass guess from someone who knows little. In the world
> of IDE, hard drives expect to be the master, and are shipped from the
> factory with that setting. CD drives, on the other hand, expect to be
> the slave. And that's about all I ever cared to know about master-slave
> relatiionships.

The master/slave setting is just another way of saying device 0 or 1. 
You cannot have two slaves or two masters on a single ribbon.  Sometimes 
there are performance reasons for having devices set as a master or a 
slave, but it won't prevent anything from working.  This has nothing to 
do with USB enclosures though.

I would imagine the drive needs to be set as a master in this case 
though, but it's not something I've ever experimented with.  The 
enclosures I have had were always master and I just left them that way.

-- 
- m0gely