Firewire Hard Drive case

[joe9173]

A few months ago I read an ad in MacWorld about some sort of external firewire device that was essentially an external firewire hard drive, without the hard drive. and you could pop your own 3.5" hard drive in it, plug it into the computer and use it as an external firewire hard drive.  I believe they were selling for about 30$.  Does anyone know what these are called, where i can find them, or anything else about them?  thanks

[Greg Dunn]

Check Other World Computing here:

http://eshop.macsales.com/Static_Pages/ind...rocess=firewire

They also sell them at Comp USA.

You won't get firewire speeds from them, because you still have an IDE drive.  But they're easy to connect, and hot-swappable.  No master/slave drive issues, either, as with internal IDE.  You can hook up as many as you want.

[kps]

I bought an ADS enclosure and I also have a drive in one of those ICE enclosures which was built by a local dealer.

Both drives have the Oxford 911 chipset and are firewire 400, not 800 enclosures. Remember, that the drive you install into the enclosure must have the jumper set to MASTER.

Also be aware, that if you use Panther, there have been issues reported with firewire 800 drives with the Oxford 922 chipset.

[joe9173]

Cool.  I don't believe the firewire 800 issue would  apply to me, i'm currently using a g4 350 mhz (only firewire is 400) and i'm considering the purchase of an ibook g4 which you may have read in my other posts, which i believe only has firewire 400.  Thanks for your input, i'll check this stuff out.

[Epaminondas]

80 MB/sec 800 Firewire case and PCI card

Whatever you get in an external case, make sure you get one with an external power brick rather than a power supply in the case.  

I know that the big external bricks can be a little awkward, but cases with an internal power supply run hotter and require extra cooling (noiser fans).

External bricks are very quiet. :-)

However, external cases with noisy fans can become very irritating over time.


Regards,

Epaminondas

[joe9173]

Thanks for the tip, i didn't know there was a difference.  Does anyone know why there are 3 firewire ports on the firewire case that Epaminondas linked to?  Thanks

[krissel]

Most cases that are FW/USB offer only two FW plugs but I think in this case it is a marketing feature so they can say they have a "hub". Kinda like a car dealer giving you a full size spare in the trunk....always nice to have an extra.

[()]

you can find them at http://www.eBay.com  I got an external DVD-RW firewire drive and an external 40 gig usb drive.

just type in computer, then look under external drives and lts of ads pop up.  

always use paypal when shopping on eBay... or a secure credit card.