How to Connect a FireWire Drive

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is Zach with Expert Village and today we are going to talk about plugging in your external firewire hard drive. Here we have a Maxtor external firewire hard drive. Simple steps to plugging it in are first, connect your power source and locating the plug on the back of your hard drive should be relatively simple. Usually power connectors are simple circular connector. Plug this in very easily. Next take your firewire cable; most of the time you will 6-pin firewire used with these kind of hard drives. Occasionally you might see a smaller 4-pin firewire drive in which case you can use a converter if you only have a 6-pin cable but if you have a 4 to 6 pin cable, then you are fine. Usually the right cable comes with the drive you buy. We are going to plug in this one with the 6-pin firewire to our computer and make sure when you are plugging in your firewire, sometimes it might seem like it should go in but its not. You might have it upside down because it is almost identical on both ends but one end is slightly smaller than the other. On the back of the computer, you will notice the firewire icon. It looks kind of like a little y and that is the firewire standard icon so plug your cable into one of those designated ports. If your external hard drive or storage device has a power button such as this one, you just switch your power to on and it is all ready to go. "