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Firewire hard drive enclosures, recommendations?

F

fs5

Lifer
I've got an extra drive laying around (IBM 60 GXP) and I'd like to hook it up to my audigy's firewire port as an extra drive. Anybody have any experience with this? Hard to find reviews on enclosures 🙂

 
I use an external enclosure that handle USB and Firewire...that way I can use it on OP Puters as well...The Oxford 911 chip is the best for Firewire unless you plan on going Firewire2 in the Future which is backward compatible so that may be the way to go now in purchasing a new Enclosure
 
I just bought two of those enclosures a couple of weeks ago. 🙂 Very good performance (doubled transfer rates compared to the other one I have, which uses an Oxford900 chipset, which didn't have throughput even close to its specifications). 41MBps burst reads, 28MBps sustained read and burst and sustained writes (Sisoft Sandra). Very quiet cooling fan too.

The only major negative to them is the assembly. The case is held together by the strips on the side -- after you set the top and bottom together, the side strips snap into notches. It's hard to get the strips snapped in, and it looks like it'll be really hard to get the case taken apart again. Of course, that's minor since most people won't be needing to take it apart.

Another issue is simply that it's very short, so the ATA cable inside is sort of scrunched in when you put in a drive. But that's not all that big a deal.
 
Originally posted by: fivespeed5
Hm... this is the best deal I could find compgeeks with 10% off via coupon. Any better deals?
Click to expand...
That's a very large case, for 5.25" drives. Works for 3.5" drives I'm sure, but it's kinda big. This one is much smaller and costs 45 cents more. However, it won't support 5.25" drives of course.

I bought this laptop case from them to house a 60 GB Toshiba 2.5" drive.

 
Oops, the ME720F is the enclosure I did buy, not the larger one. Same performance of course.

I don't know what chip Maxtor and Western Digital use, but this mentions that IEEE-1394 has a native 32 bit address capability and Maxtor uses a bridge board with firmware that connects it to the 48bit addressing of their ATA133 interface. The Oxford911 chip datasheet doesn't specify a limitation in drive size, so I would presume that it's actually a limitation of the firmware used in the bridge board, not the bridge chip itself (similar to how many motherboards can be updated to support 48 bit addressing without supporting ATA133). I couldn't find any other mentions of how this limit is bypassed.

One thing I found that I hadn't been aware of; apparently a USB2.0 connected hard drive can't be formatted from within Windows, as USB is considered a peripheral bus but Firewire is considered a drive bus so it works fine. The article writer said that Windows can't even see the drive unless it's already formatted. The review I read was of a USB2.0 drive enclosure, and the only one I've bothered to read, so maybe he was just stupid, but that seems like a rather large downside to a USB drive.
 
Originally posted by: Eug
Originally posted by: fivespeed5
Hm... this is the best deal I could find compgeeks with 10% off via coupon. Any better deals?
Click to expand...
That's a very large case, for 5.25" drives. Works for 3.5" drives I'm sure, but it's kinda big. This one is much smaller and costs 45 cents more. However, it won't support 5.25" drives of course.

I bought this laptop case from them to house a 60 GB Toshiba 2.5" drive.
Click to expand...
Hmmm... Not recommended. Mine exploded today...
 
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