Greg K — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 10:59:33 +0000

I know this is an old thread, but found it in searching for external hard drives, which I have a question about.

Does anyone have pro/cons for just getting a firewire enclosure and putting a drive in it (I know the pro of I have a few 20 and 40 gig hd's sitting around, so overall cost is lower). I was wondering more about if the premade external drives have better shock absorbsion in them? I am needing this for my laptop, as my 15 gig drive is about maxed out.

I did get a USB 2 5.25 enclosure to try out, however, my laptop isn't USB 2, and USB 2 is like 40x faster I think I read on the manual INSIDE the box, not outside. I didn't realize there was that much difference betweent the two. On my desktop with USB 2, it is pretty nice. However it went so slow on my laptop that copying a 185meg file casued the system to tell me windows explorere is "Not Responding" until the copy was done.

The good news, in doing some research, it looks like I do have a firewire on my laptop, just didn't know it. I have a sony, and when I got it, it listed the port as an "i.LINK (iEEE 1394) S400 Interface", and mainly listed it's features for connecting to camcorders for fast video x-fer. Well in looking up firewire, and seeing 1394, it rang a bell, so I went to sony's site and bingo, I have firewire! Well I found the adapter to convert from the sony 4 pin i.Link to 6 pin standard Firewire for about $5 Now just need to find a good enclosure.

I did like the idea of a 5.25 one at first as it would allow me to use optical drives to burn data, but then realized heck, if I need to transfer to someone else's computer I can just plug it in as a removeable drive now.

But anyhow, I'm sleepy and rambling on..... Mainly wanted to hear any goods/bads on firewire enclosures and/or prepackaged drives.

-Greg

nike_guy_man — Sun, 16 May 2004 19:56:25 +0000

teammatt, I have been doing it that way, but I want a backup. I want to be able to have a HD full of movies, the VHS, and the DVD tapes.
I want it on the HD so I can easily go back and pick out the clips from 25 hours of video of 1 or 2 people.

Thanks for the suggestion mairving

mairving — Sun, 16 May 2004 12:59:15 +0000

My advice learned from a mistake I made once back when I archived a lot of files to a Zip disk then removed them from my hard drive. The zip drive developed the click of death and ruined every disk that was put in it. I lost a lot of files. So the advice is never have something valuable in just one place. If you put it on a DVD, then either have it on your hard drive also or burn 2 DVD's and keep one in a safe place. The external firewire drives are a little pricey but I would get the biggest one that I could like this Maxtor 250GB one. It looks like it will also work on your Mac. You could go with a cheaper USB one. I am not sure though if your Mac supports USB 2.0. I wouldn't go with the slower USB.

teammatt3 — Sat, 15 May 2004 22:35:49 +0000

Why don't you put 1 gig worth of tape on your hard drive then burn it to a DVD, then delete the tape files, do it over and over, or get a maxtor external hard drive