Running 2 External Harddrives
I’ve had a 250GB FreeAgent external drive for quite some time, and have been recently running out of space and feeling very uneasy that all my archived photography was on one drive – all my eggs were in one basket that could fail at any time!
So I went out and bought a new 320GB FreeAgent GO drive. First off this thing is amazingly small, such a nice change from my behemoth first drive!
I did run into one issue that I think others are likely to run into, so I want to talk about how to get both drives to run at the same time and play nice with each other. My problem was that on plugging both in, that would start up and glow and hum, but only one would show in the My Computer window with my C: and D: drives. After posting on a few different forums and troubleshooting possible issues to narrow it down, I finally came up with an explanation and pain-free solution.
When both drives are plugged in they are automatically assigned to F:… but only one peripheral can have any given drive name, so having both plugged in trying to use F: was creating a signature conflict. The solution was to right click Computer (or My Computer depending on which Windows OS you are using), go to Manage, then click Disk Management (this might be under Storage). I right clicked the drive that was showing in the top list and selected “Change Drive and Letter Paths”. Choose a letter that’s far down the alphabet – each time you connect a new peripheral it’s auto assigned a letter, so you don’t want to create another conflict down the road. I chose to remap it to M:
I looked down to the more detailed listing of drives, where you should be seeing Drive 0, 1 and 2. The first was my internal harddrive which was running fine, the second was one external harddrive running fine, the third was offline due to the signature conflict. I right clicked the offline drive and chose “Online”, it turned on and was auto assigned to E:, which I then changed to N: to avoid the same problem happening in the future with other peripherals. Now both of my drives are running happily side by side!
–Stephanie
