USB/FireWire Drive Tower



The Problem

I, like many computer geeks, have way too many external drives. I currently have three external drives connected to this mac and plan for more. In addition to these, I have a Palm Pilot, printer, scanner, camera, and some USB hubs. The net effect is a lot of cables.

Like I said, I want yet more drives. The problem is that I'm going to go to the totally insane level of cabling and desktop clutter. I'm going to have to live with some of it, but what if all the drives and hubs could be in one box?

The Bus Station

Belkin makes a device called the "Bus Station." It has a built-in four port USB hub and slots for three modules. When you buy it, those three slots are each filled with a single USB port module, meaning the hub has a total of 7 ports. You can replace any of those modules with modules that have 4 USB ports or converter modules (SCSI, Parallel, Serial).

Belkin obviously sells enough of these things to be profitable but I don't have much use for one. I don't use legacy devices and thus don't need those converters. There's the pure USB hub configurations but to fully utilize it I would need a pile of USB devices that puts my current setup to shame. I need something else.

The Solution

I want the general idea of Belkin's Bus Station (expandablity via hot-swapable modules) but refocused from converters to storage. First, add FireWire support. Then make it bigger and more boxy. Next add an internal hard drive. Put a pair of USB and FireWire ports on the front and back. Now, instead of focusing on USB/FireWire converters, Build HD, CD-RW, ZIP, and SuperDisk modules. It would be best if all these were FireWire devices. The tower should be a powered USB & Firewire hub and provide straight DC to the modules through an additional connection. When used outside the tower, the modules get their power via an external DC converter.

Another nice touch would be to have an opening at the back of each drive bay slot to allow for the module to still provide additional connections. This would allow you to still have modules like: TV Tuners, Analog/Digital AV converters, SCSI, etc... without having lots of cables hanging off the front of the tower.

Here's a sketch of what I'm thinking of: (Front View)

The tower in this sketch has three drive slots and one internal hard drive. Personally, I would like a model with five or even seven drive slots but it depends on the market for such a device.

Here are the advantages:

  • You can use the drive without the tower (Try that with an internal drive)
  • Reduced desktop clutter
  • One central power switch located on the Tower. In fact, it could auto power on/off via USB.
  • You get some extra USB & FireWire ports in an easily accessible location
  • The drives are hot swappable!
  • Turns a laptop or desktop with limited expansion into an expansion powerhouse!