BusLink USB Hard Drives

byTed Peterson
When you buy a laptop computer you will notice that most of them do not have an extra large hard drive. The one that I picked up in 2001 only had a 3.43 gig hard drive.
As I do a lot of work with pictures and use both a film scanner and Adobe Photoshop as a program you can see that I did not have any room and I would have to find some other way to store and work with this.
When I was at the computer store I came across a group of USB hard drives made by BusLink. They were all under $400.00 and the instructions said (with limitations) that they would work. They came in all sizes.
I picked up a 13 gig one for $179.00 and took it home. After loading the program on the laptop it worked. I was able to save a lot of pictures, etc.
I then picked up a 40 gig hard drive and it worked good. I then picked up a 20 gig drive and had the computer store make it into two 10 gig drives, so that I could then have 5 different hard drives.
One thing that I found out was that as they were USB 1 hard drives, they would NOT take a big program. It would not load the Adobe Photoshop program. I had to place that program on my computer hard drive and then all the files, pictures, etc on the BusLink.
I then checked to see if these drives would work on my desk top computer. It was a Computer City 333 penidum running Windows 98. The 13 gig and the 40 gig worked fine but nothing I did would not make the computer find the 20 gig drive. Maybe by having the 20 gig split into 2 parts did this.
In 2002 I picked up a new HP 900 Celerun Computer running Window ME and had a lot of trouble. The 3 hard drives could NOT be plugged in until the computer desk top was up and running. If you had then plugged in when you turned on the computer it would lock up. You had to wait until the icon's were showing and then plug in the hard drives. I then found a way around this.
In Jan of 2002 I wanted to add more USB items to my computer and in place of paying about $40.00 for a USB hub I spent the $40.00 for a 5 port USB 2 card that would also handle USB 1 items. I plugged in the USB hard drive as a test to see if it would lock up the computer. It did not and I then plugged in all 3 hard drives and to this day they are working and by having them plugged in all the time, I store them under the livening room chair.
The computer store said that they are going to also bring up some USB 2 hard drives, and some other sizes. Check with your computer store or check their web page.
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