hard drive enclosures and external drives

Leopard

weegie.geek wrote: »

Not checked the price difference between the 400 and 800 enclosures over here Leopard, but how about a 2.5">3.5" adapter (rails and the cable) inside a 3.5" firewire enclosure? The bracket and the cable should only cost a few pounds.

Thanks for the idea, W_G (and I do appreciate that a larger enclosure would help with the heat dispersal).

Nevertheless, I like the convenience of the small form-factor 2.5" enclosures and they also run more readily off the power in the Firewire bus, obviating the need for a mains PSU.

In Britain, the only two Firewire 800 enclosures I've been able to track down are the WiebeTech (at Computer Warehouse for £93) and the Span "Daisy Cutter" at £63.

In America, there's Oyen-Digital at $80 (plus shipping) and Other World Computing at $88 (plus shipping).

OWC is a much-loved company in the Mac community. It's based in Woodstock, IIllinois, near Chicago, and ships stuff all over the world. I usually buy a number of items from them, once or twice a year, and have them combined into a single package to save on shipping costs.

But I bought one of their 2.5" Firewire 800 & USB2 enclosures as a one-off last week because I'd upgraded a MacBook Pro from a 160 GB, 5400 rpm drive (original spec) to a Hitachi 200 GB, 7200 rpm drive (from LambdaTek, in England) and wanted a Firewire enclosure for the 160 GB drive that had come out of the ProBook. Did the drive swap (and cloning) last Sunday.

The OWC enclosure is a really nice little item, with a large, exposed aluminium heat-sink on its base which disposes of heat well. And, of course, I was only putting a 5,400 rpm drive into it.

It uses the Oxford chipset (the best, for Firewire - the chipset is important with Firewire) and I like the fact that it has an on/off switch, for when you want to power it down but allow it to remain within a daisy-chain.

In fact, I like it so much I've just ordered another one, together with a few other OWC bits and pieces.

Receiving a package of Mac goodies from OWC is a bit like an early Christmas. :j :dance: :xmastree: :dance: :j

weegie.geek

Leopard wrote: »

In Britain, the only two Firewire 800 enclosures I've been able to track down are the WiebeTech (at Computer Warehouse for £93) and the Span "Daisy Cutter" at £63

Ouch. A lot of money for a box.

I see Deal Extreme have some, but they don't mention if they're 400 or 800. They're dirt cheap though, as you'd expect from them. Might be worth a go next time you want a 400, maybe you'll get a nice surprise and it'll be an 800.

In America, there's Oyen-Digital at $80 (plus shipping) and Other World Computing at $88 (plus shipping).

So probably about the same price when you include shipping.

aqueoushumour01

firewire's not an option for me. i've only got USB unfortunately - what brand would you recommend for a 2.5 enclosure powered my usb?

digp

Mbuto_Banjo wrote: »

I bought an excellent Icy Box enclosure from Amazon a few months ago.

Is that to keep ice in?




















































:rotfl:

Lakeuk

Mbuto_Banjo wrote: »

I bought an excellent Icy Box enclosure from Amazon a few months ago.

I've got a Icy Box IB-168 and I'm well impressed with it, my Antec Sonata II case has four harddiscs (I record alot of TV) but really I only need two them all the time as the other two only really needed when I want to catch up on some recordings and at xmas for obvious reasons. So for ages I've been wanting an easy way to temporary remove the drives that I don't need on a regular basis. I would of gone for caddies but it would of mean't buying one for each harddisc but I came across a icybox product which forefills my need, all I need to do is open a door and slide the SATA HDD in, close the door and lock it to avoid accidently opening it when the PC turned on. Alot easier and cheaper (at £12) than using caddies.

http://www.raidsonic.de/en/pages/products/details.php?we_objectID=4343

Leopard

Aqueous,

If you want Firewire and if your laptop has an ExpressCard slot or a Cardbus or PCMCIA slot which you aren't using for anything else, you could buy an expansion card to put in it that would give you Firewire (400) and even, in some cases, Firewire 800.

Whereas a 2.5" USB2 external drive would probably need two USB2 ports to give it enough power to run without a mains power supply, if you put a Firewire card in the expansion slot of your laptop (and if your external drive has a Firewire port, of course) it won't need to use up any of your USB2 ports, leaving them free for your other accessories.

Frankly, the whole problem here is that you have still not divulged what make and model of laptop you have: that is why this thread is full of people hazarding wild guesses as to what might work for you - nobody knows your laptop's specifications.

As a general answer to your question about what type of USB2 enclosure to buy, I'd say it was best to purchase one that comes with both a USB2 Y-lead and a mains power supply unit. Either that or a small, mains-powered USB2 hub. That way, you will be able to run your drive off just one USB2 port when you want to.

If you decide to go the Firewire route, don't buy cheap, generic items of vague provenance. USB2 is, essentially, a dumb system that uses your computer's CPU to tell it what to do. Firewire, on the other hand, is a smart system which (to put it loosely) runs independently of your computer's CPU. So, it needs to have a decent chipset to do this properly. The best chipsets are made by a company called Oxford: look for Firewire devices that have an "Oxford chipset" or are made by a major and respected manufacturer. That way you should have no problems; I have never experienced any, and I use Firewire all the time - have done so for years.

If, on the other hand, you buy something with a cheap Firewire chipset it can crash your system and corrupt your data: under pressure, it will fall down on the task of working out what bit of data to send to which Firewire device in the chain.

Nobody can really assist you specifically until you've found out whether your laptop needs a SATA hard drive or a PATA/IDE hard drive. If you're going to cannibalise a new external hard drive instead of buying the drive and the enclosure separately, you need to be very sure whether the drive inside it is SATA or PATA/IDE - and the only way to find out for sure, without opening it up to find out, is to ask the manufacturer or the retailer.



Weegie G,

Indeed not cheap, as I commented before.

I'd need to be feeling extremely profligate to spend £92 on an enclosure for a drive that costs £68. :shocked:

Nevertheless, it's important to remember that Firewire 800 runs at (about) twice the speed of USB2 and Firewire 400. So, it does makes a big difference when transferring large files; it approaches the speed of Gigabit Ethernet.

I use both Firewire 800 and Firewire 400 daily, so I'm fully aware of the difference.

Usefully, you can boot a Mac off an external Firewire drive (provided you install the Mac operating system on it, of course). This makes a Firewire 800 drive a feasible device off which to run quite a fast Mac.

Last weekend, for example, I used a (LaCie 3.5") Firewire 800 external drive to boot a MacBook Pro, so that I could then clone that Mac's own internal hard drive on to an identical 2.5" drive running (temporarily) in a (OWC 2.5") Firewire 800 enclosure.

Then, I was able to check that the clone was working properly by booting the ProBook off it, using Firewire 800.

I concede that there were other ways to go about it but that was the simplest, fastest and most convenient way to do it. I didn't want to put the new drive into the other MacBook Pro until I knew it was running fine. (You don't lightly change the hard drive in a MacBook Pro - it's quite a convoluted procedure and it takes the best part of an hour to do it carefully. Never mind all the tiny screws of different lengths you have to remove from eight different sections of the computer and keep track of - some of them cross-head and some of them Torx-6.)

Block-by-block cloning a 200 GB, 7200 rpm hard drive takes hours with USB2 but Firewire 800 does it a lot more quickly (even though, of course, the actual work is being done by the drive heads.)

Interestingly (to me, anyway), the cloned 2.5" drive (a Hitachi 7K200) was not especially hot at the end of it. I'd assumed I'd have to leave it to cool for a while before putting it into the ProBook but no, it was just warm and I was able to install it immediately.

(Just as well: I was doing all this on the kitchen table and was getting increasingly meaningful looks from across the room - I tightened up the final screw on the outer casing of the ProBook just as dinner was about to be served. Wouldn't have finished in time if I'd been using USB2!)

Luckily, I got a useful $30 discount on my current 2.5" OWC Firewire 800 enclosure because they offered me a refurb. It's fine. Total cost, to my door, was £43. It came by USPS Airmail, took five days and there was no duty to pay on it.

Shipping cost on the second one I've ordered - indeed, for the whole of my package of items - was just $4. It's now quietly making its way to the hotel in America to which my companion is currently winging her way for a conference next week and I'm tracking it online. :cool: It will then come home in her luggage.

I did ask how she'd feel about adding an Apple 30" Display to her hand luggage for the return flight but fortunately she's got a sense of humour.

(Mind you, having just received an email from her to say that she got bumped up to First Class on her flight because of overbooking and is now sipping a bottle of champagne, this might be a good moment to suggest it again...)