External FireWire drives are a great way to archive your media when using the multimedia lab. FireWire drives have become very affordable and are a much better solution for archiving large files than other removable media.

Plug your FireWire drive into the FireWire cable under the workstation that you want to use. There is a firewire cable provided along with a power strip on the floor to plug in your drive. Once the drive is powered up and patched in, the drive should appear on the desktop. If the drive does not appear on the desktop within in a few seconds, restart the workstation that you are using.

We highly recommend that you only use your FireWire drives for archiving and restoring files and not for audio or video editing. You should always work from the internal "Temporary Media" disk built into the workstations. This will give you the best performance in audio and video edting.

Full size FireWire drives which have built in power supplies and fans work best for audio and video editing projects. Most vendors have educational discounts if you ask. iPods work fine for most non-video tasks. Our labs do not support the double speed FireWire 800 connections.

Please do not unplug FireWire cables from the computers. There is a silver FireWire cable provided at each workstation for you to plug into your external FireWire drive.

Make sure your drag your external FireWire icon off of the desktop into the trash before you unlug your drive. If you forget the computer will lockup.

Our evening lab monitors will help you format your drive to mac format at the lab monitor station. Formatting to Mac format will give you the best performance with our Mac labs.