"Mike Rivers" wrote ...
...but it's one more tug on the ribbon cable inside the carrier,
so it probably takes a little off the life of the carrier assembly.
That may or may not be significant. I haven't had one fail yet.

I have. :-( The IDC (insulation-displacement connector)
finally let go and I was left with an unterminated ribbon
cable. ~Fortunately, it was one of my $14 generic carriers,
and not the sexy gray one with "Alesis" on it.

As for alternatives to the FirePort 1394, it can be done in
software if only we knew the disk/file format. All my
computers have plug-in drive bays identical to the ones in
the HD24 and I can plug the Alesis drive carriers into any
of my computers.

But, of course, the drives are not formatted in anything that
MSwin recognizes, so it just ignores them. But I can access
each sector and decode the data with software if I only knew
how to interperet it. One could concievably write a driver
that would make the Alesis drive look like a regular MSwin
drive with a bunch of AIFF or WAV or whatever files. You
could drag-n-drop just like any other drive in Windows
Explorer.

And the hardware part of the FirePort 1394 *appears* to be a
conventional drive-bay to Firewire adapter made by someone
else, but OEMed to Alesis in their gray color and with their
name screen-printed on top. As others have observed, Alesis
sells it only bundled with their FST/Connect software (a
standalone application).