External harddrives and just using enclosures?

[fyleow]

..

 

[Sheriff]

Actually I prefer the external way as I can use them on OP's Rigs. I use a 120Gig in mine but think they support ober 130 gigs

 

[EeyoreX]

There is no difference really, as external drives from Maxtor, Western Digital, etc are simply internal drives put inside a nice Maxtor, Western Digital, etc branded enclosure. You do have to look and make sure the enclosure you buy supports drives over 137GB. When you shop around just look and see if it tells you if it supports the larger drives.

\Dan

 

[Blain]

Price and the option to use an optical drive are the differences.

I bought this one. I like that it uses a regular power cord rather than having to also carry around an AC adapter. It holds a regular HD or you can mount an optical drive in it.
Be warned... it's plastic and the fit is not what a metal enclosure would be. But for less than $40 shipped, it's not bad.


BTW, Windows 2000 and XP have drivers for it. 98 may have to have drivers installed before using it.

 

[acemcmac]

internal, especially if SATA will be faster because you wont have to bridge IDE through whatever transient interface youre working with... in this case USB2. I did a lot of research on this back when I was looking to add one to a mac, and I came to one conclusion:

Oxford makes the best chipsets for DIY external storage applications hands down bar-none. Specifically the Oxford911 chipset destroys everything in IDE>Firewire setups...

Make sure you do a lot of window shopping to take it all in.