cable + pc pins

Hello I have an external hard drive and there is a usb cable and another which has three pins in the slot. The drive also has a place for the usb and the 3 pin cable end. What do I look for when I get another pc in terms of the specifications. I don't know how to coordinate the drive cable with a new pc in terms of how the specs are phrased. I Googled a lot about pins but readings only say 4 and 6 pins. It is supposed to be firewire I think but I need the right name so I can get the right pc port for this 3 pin cable that fits into the drive. Thank you

I'm sorry but I don't fully understand the issue, I appreciate connecting an external hard drive, but don't understand how pins come into that, could you give the make\model of this external drive, and is it a bare drive or in some kind of housing, and what you are using to connect with, then I can try and see what you mean. Generally speaking if the drive connects via a USB cable, then it should work that way with any system, at least any drive I have seen used that way, if you could get a pic and post that as well as the above, it will be easier to visualise what you are after then we can advise appropriately for you.

On the back of the plastic housing that looks like a book, there are some ports or holes. One is for power,one is for a usb cable and the third the one, is the one I am trying to portray. It is a port with three little holes that a connector with three tines/pins can fit into. This connection, similar to the usb cable, communicates with the external hard drive. It is a Western Digital My book Home 2T I keep referring to the cable as it has three tines/pins in a slotted recess which slides into the port in the back of the drive. So, my question is, do I need to have that same port on my new pc to use it as firewire. Or, what does the cable end of a firewire connection look like - Something has to plug into a port and this happens to have three pins on each end. Another way of putting it is, does the back of my new pc have to have a port that will accomodate the end of this three pronged cable? I have never seen what firewire ports look like and do not know if they come with different connectors. i would not want to buy a new pc and learn i could not hook up my new external harrd drive because I do not have the matching connection, male to female. Thank you for the patience.

This is what it looks like. The term six pin through me off as I have two sets of three pin as shown in the picture.
I now know what to order.

http://www.jontrosky.com/images/Firewire_6_pin_port.jpg

Well the pic you show is most definitely FireWire, simplest way to describe it is think of a USB port, now shape 1 end so it is close to being a semi circle, except it has 2 flat corners as opposed to an actual curve, but assuming I have found you're device, it has the most connection options I have ever seen, it has what it calls a quad interface, so from what I can see you have 4 possible connection types available to you, this means if the system you connect to has the appropriate connection, the external drive can take advantage of a much faster connection by using a different port, here is what they say:-

Quad interface - Power your creativity with connections for ultra-fast eSATA and FireWire 800. For flexibility and convenience, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 are also included.

This is what came up in a search of the model you gave, if this is right then what you have is 2x1TB drives in raid0, so it will appear as a single 2TB drive, this gives you speed, and is the default setting when you get it, BUT, you can change this to raid1, this will halve you're drive size down to 1TB, and the benefit of raid1 is it's a mirrored array, in raid0 if one of the drives goes faulty, then thats everything gone, you can't retrieve data from a single drive as it's spread between the 2 drives, and as such has the risk of losing the data if the worst happened.
With a mirrored (raid1) array you get 2 drives with identical data, so if one drive dies, the other drive has a carbon copy of the data, so if what you're using this for is essential data, a raid1 array is a must.

Now the important thing is to use the right cable with the right port, eSATA is the fastest connection, and if the PC you connect too has eSATA then that is the best connection type to use.
The unit appears to come with all the cables, all except the eSATA one anyway, that cable comes with the system or card for the system as far as I know, and you drive has 2 FireWire cables, and 2 ports as well, the difference is one is half the speed of the other, so if your using the 400 port, you should use the 400 cable, same with the 800 port, otherwise you wont get the max from it, but go Here and it should help explain the difference in each.

As to if your new PC can take any of these formats, you will need to check the documentation that came with it, if you have a make\model for the new system I can try and see what it has available to you, needless to say do NOT jam in any old cable until you have clearly identified which port does what, hope this helps a bit.

The drive came with one usb cable and one firewire cable. If I use the usb cable, I assume I will get usb speed with 2T. If I use one firewire cable I will get firewire speed (400)with 2T also? I guess if I bought another firewire cable it would be (800) speed but I am not going to. There is no chance of plugging the wrong one in as they are so different and so unique. I want the simplest so I hope I can just plug the one firewire cable in at each end and have firewire speed with 2T capacity. Curently, the drive is not working with my machines. When I try with my 8 year old pcs I get a message that windows cannot write to the drive. I ran a chkdsk and it was ok. I have formatted NTFS also. I can get windows to recognize the drive and can image to it but after a while the systray shows the error message and the drive icon disappears and reappears. No data is lost. I wish I had a new pc I could image to but i don't so i will wait till I get a new one. I am optimistic that will solve the problem. Thank you for all the information. I coud not understand it all but did get most of it.

I fear the age of the system may be why the 2TB wont play nice, someone else recently had a similar issue, 1TB worked fine for them, but could not use the 2TB on the system, the conclusion is older systems just aren't able to work with such large sizes.
The best\fastest connection the drive can use is eSATA, the others don't even come close, so this option is 3 times faster than the next fastest option, so any future plans would be best served with this option in mind, by ensuring any new system included an eSATA port.

As too cables, if this is the correct unit I linked above, it states that it should come with the following cables:-

Package Includes

•Dual-drive storage system
•FireWire 800 cable
•FireWire 800 to 400 cable
•USB cable
•AC adapter
•Software CD
•Quick Install Guide

So if this is a new purchase it may be worth double checking that you got everything you should of, the closest guess I can make as to why you only got the 1 FireWire cable is down to the dual cable in bold above, but I don't see how it could fit both 400 and 800, as you say the connection is different for each.

I'm guessing the bit that was confusing was about the types of raid available ?
I certainly am no expert in that, but know of it's basic concept, and broke down to it's simplest explanation, raid0 uses multiple drives that appear as a single drive on the system of the combined size of all the drives put together, and is built for speed.
Alternately raid1 uses equal numbers of drives, and each drive is a mirror of the other, like carbon paper, it leaves an exact duplicate of the other drive, these show up as single drives, BUT, they only show up as the drive size of the individual drive.

So in conclusion raid0 is for speed, raid1 is for security, if a single drive in raid0 dies, ALL data is gone, if a single drive in raid1 dies, the other drive still has the data, so is the safer option if you want security and can't afford to lose the data, hope that clears up some confusion for you.

I am getting the idea. Btw, I have an esata port besides the usb and 2 firewire ports. How I got this drive is a long story. A super at W. D. actually gave it to me free because I had so many problems getting the 1T to work. I will get an esata port for my new pc so I will have all the cables I need except for the second firewire one. I did not realize how much of a gift I got until I starting discussing it in the forum. I think it is around $ 200 plus with the esata feature and all. I sure hope it works with the new pc. Thanx for the help.