What is USB

USB is Universal Serial Bus establish communication between devices and a host controller (usually personal computers)

TYPES OF USB HARD DRIVES AND PORTS

In some cases when you connect an external hard drive to your computer with the USB port, you may need to load some software drivers that came with the drive.

After you install the software and partition the hard drive, the computer will assign a drive letter to the drive such as Drive E.

We installed a Western Digital 120GB Hard Drive to our Pentium 4 computer with Windows XP.Our new external Drive did not come with software so we simply connected the drive to the computer's USB Port.

USB stands for Universal Serial Bus which comes in the USB 1.1 which has a speed of 12mbs.But we connected our external hard drive to a USB 2.0 port
which runs 480 megabits per second. This is over 40 times faster than the usb 1.1

INSTALLING THE USB PORT

Our Pentium 4 computer had 2 USB 1.1 ports but no USB 2.0 ports. We installed the drive on one of our 1.1 ports and it operated. But a snail moves
like a jackrabbit compared to the response we got from our external drive.

We then install a USB 2.0 adapter in an empty expansion slot. We opened the system unit case and located a PCI or Peripheral Computer Interface slot to install the card.

After removing the rear retaining cover, we carefully pushed the USB 2.0 Adapter into the PCI Slot. We then checked to be sure it was fully inserted
into the slot and secured the card to the case with the retaining screw
used to hold the rear plate in place.

With the USB 2.0 Adapter installed, we replaced the PC cover and re-connected all cables and peripherals. Next we plugged in the computer and turned it on.

Windows XP recognized the new device and asked to install the device drivers needed to communicate to the adapter. The adapter came with a cd-rom which was used to install the software.

With our new high speed USB 2.0 card in place, we are now ready to install our Western Digital External Hard Drive to the USB port.