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External Hard Drive enclosure-fi

post #1 of 24
6/6/07 at 6:44pm
Thread Starter 
Hi guys, I'm going to get a 500 GB IDE seagate and I need recommendation for a good external hard-drive enclosure.
Several questions that I want to ask,
1. Is an external enclosure w/ fan will be a better choice for 500 GB harddrive?
2. Which one is better for external hard drive, IDE or SATA?

I have Ultra Hard drive enclosure but I read the review on amazon.com and it's not promising. I don't want my harddrive to crap out on me because of the enclosure.
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post #2 of 24
6/6/07 at 6:56pm
why not just get an external hard drive? They're not that expensive these days. I like having a network hard drive. Western Digital now has a 1 TB network drive for $380!

http://www.buy.com/cat/hard_drives_f...nal_h/450.html
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post #3 of 24
6/6/07 at 8:33pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Davesrose View Post
why not just get an external hard drive? They're not that expensive these days. I like having a network hard drive. Western Digital now has a 1 TB network drive for $380!
The thing that has stopped me from doing just that is the external drives have not been avaialble with the same long warranty (the internal drives usually have 3 years for Max and WD and 5 years for Seagate vs 1 year for the external drives).

However I did recently find a Seagate "Free Agent" USB/eSATA drive with the full Five Years.
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post #4 of 24
6/7/07 at 10:52am
Thread Starter 
Hi guys, no other recommendation yet

Davesrose, thank's for your recommendation. I prefer to use Seagate, I got bad experience with WD drive dies on me, however when I check Seagate free agent review on amazon and newegg, it doesn't sound promising so I think I'm better off going DIY.

Btw, another question guys.
Since I'm planning to buy macbook when they release OSX leopard, how should I format the harddrive to be compatible with windows & OSX?
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post #5 of 24
6/7/07 at 12:29pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by NiceCans View Post
The thing that has stopped me from doing just that is the external drives have not been avaialble with the same long warranty (the internal drives usually have 3 years for Max and WD and 5 years for Seagate vs 1 year for the external drives).
Well FWIW, I've used a now old Acom firewire drive for several years. I have to run several computers for my work, so I need a network drive that they all can share. For a couple years, I've had a Western Digital network drive that stays on 24/7 and is used a lot. No hiccups so far. Though I just looked at buy.com's drives. Looks like WD does just have 1 year warranty on their consumer drives....but Seagate actually now has a 5 year warranty on their external drives.

-RYCeT.....there are other companies besides WD and Seagate But if you do go DIY, I can't offer much advise. I do have a laptop hard drive enclosure that's really nice....but haven't dealt with regular drive enclosures.

And for making the drive compatible with windows and mac, I'd probably go ahead and make two partitions on the drive. The mac might be able to read the windows partition, but you might not get optimal performance. So having one partition that's a windows format and another that's a mac format seems the easiest.
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post #6 of 24
6/7/07 at 12:42pm
Here in Sydney I just saw an ad for a Lacie 500GB for AUS$277. I think it's quite cheap huh?
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post #7 of 24
6/7/07 at 12:56pm
Wow it's amazing how prices have dropped on hard drives over the past few years(not even that!)

I remember our first computer had like 6 HDD's in it and it was "only" like 8MBs.
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post #8 of 24
6/7/07 at 1:39pm
Rycet, I use two LaCie offboard drives. The USB one handles my Itunes music library (currently around 320GB) and is quick and quiet. The Firewire one I use for backups.

I recently bought a GTech offboard Firewire and USB drive, which I used to back up my Windows music library. To use this Mac-formatted drive on the Windows machine, I simply connected the drive to my Mac, selected "Erase Disk" and then selected the PC/Mac format and it works fine on both. Many drives are already formatted this way. I like the GTech drive because it has no fan. It's bigger than the others, but very quiet. They've gotten good reviews on the Macintouch Web site. Not available from Newegg, unfortunately.
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post #9 of 24
6/7/07 at 1:46pm
Rycet, my enclosure of choice is the NewerTech miniStack. It's a bit pricey, but I like that I can use both FireWire and USB2.0 with it. I've got a 200GB Seagate IDE drive in it right now.

I'm not sure if the MacBook will support eSATA, if it does that's definitely the way to go.
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post #10 of 24
6/7/07 at 4:58pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Chaos View Post
Rycet, I use two LaCie offboard drives. The USB one handles my Itunes music library (currently around 320GB) and is quick and quiet. The Firewire one I use for backups.

I recently bought a GTech offboard Firewire and USB drive, which I used to back up my Windows music library. To use this Mac-formatted drive on the Windows machine, I simply connected the drive to my Mac, selected "Erase Disk" and then selected the PC/Mac format and it works fine on both. Many drives are already formatted this way. I like the GTech drive because it has no fan. It's bigger than the others, but very quiet. They've gotten good reviews on the Macintouch Web site. Not available from Newegg, unfortunately.
Thank's Lord Chaos, however I haven't got any mac yet in the house so I need to figure out how to format a harddrive on pc/windows which will be useable on mac when I got my macbook later.
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post #11 of 24
6/8/07 at 1:23am
I've used Vantec enclosures a few times with good overall success. They're quick, shiny, and well built.

I'd strongly recommend SATA instead of IDE, but if you already have an IDE drive that'll work fine too. Vantec SATA enclosures give you the option of eSATA, which is a direct link to the SATA controller on your computer's motherboard (if you have onboard SATA, that is). This bypasses USB altogether and gives the computer a direct communication link to the disk.

Plus, you still get to use USB if you'd like. There should still be a performance boost with IDE even over USB.
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post #12 of 24
6/8/07 at 1:40am
http://www.cooldrives.com/index.html

best enclosures i've ever come across, my friend has a pair of the dual raid enclosures for his business which run mirroring for backup purposes so he has a minimum of 3 copies of his data at the end of the day, they have anything from your basic usb enclosure to quad drive raid enclosures and network setups

edit: i stand corrected, they have an 8 drive raid enclosure, not that anyone really needs that, but hey, why not?
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post #13 of 24
6/8/07 at 3:08am
AMS enclosures are the best, no doubt.

Check em out!
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post #14 of 24
6/8/07 at 3:18am
i recommend this method

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post #15 of 24
6/8/07 at 1:11pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by RYCeT View Post
Thank's Lord Chaos, however I haven't got any mac yet in the house so I need to figure out how to format a harddrive on pc/windows which will be useable on mac when I got my macbook later.
I'm pretty sure Macs will read/write drives formatted FAT32 without any issues. I would recheck for you but no longer have a Windows hard drive in the apartment.
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