Thanks for the responses. Once we finally get rid of ATAPI/IDE all will be well in the world.
So I went to the local computer store and picked up an "I-Rocks" combo USB 1.1/2.0 and 1394/1394a enclosure and a 250GB Seagate IDE drive, threw them together, and the Mac picked it up instantly. Just had to initialize and format the drive. No fuss no muss. Cool how you can put an OS 9 "driver" on the drive for backwards compatability. I would guess the driver is an abstraction layer between OS 9 and the OS X filesystem. Cool beans anyhow.
Funny how I got so worked up about doing this for a Mac. I've got external drives running on my Windows and 'ix machines that I threw together and never had a problem. Just was a little jittery about the "my drive puked and lost all my data" thing. My friend though does have a couple of external Lacie drives and says he always un-mounts them correctly and has never had a problem so I think this one will work fine for him.
LJ
