[CaseCom]

I've read through about 20 "Which FireWire hard drive should I get?" threads in this forum. Half of them had no responses at all, but in those that did I saw no consensus on one that stood out above the rest.

I also read Macworld magazine's recent FireWire hard drive comparison test. They were rated all the same except for fussing over documentation and such.

So I figure I'd just drive over to my local computer shop and buy whatever. They had a 40-gig LaCie HD (called just "the LaCie FireWire Hard Drive" -- must be the previous generation before the new d2's they have featured on their Web site) for $169.

Anyone have any experience with this drive? Any reason I shouldn't buy it? Does it have the vaunted "Oxford 911" bridge chip?

[Wagnerite]

for 170 bucks....
newegg has a firewird hd enclosure for 75 bucks (oxford chipset) and that means you have about 100 bucks left over for an HD. WesternDigital's harddrives are on sale just about everywhere now due to the arrival of their 200gig series. you can easily get a 100 gig HD for around 120 bucks. IMHO, it's cheaper if you build one yourself then buy something pre-page'd.

just my opinion tho, i know some people don't like to fuss with building stuff.

[OmniX]

For the buildityerself route--what is the best enclosure to purchase for a large (i.e. >80GB) drive?
I've heard that some 3.5 enclosures have poor ventilation (weak fans, bad designs) which can lead to heat problems (and ultimately drive failure I guess).
So, any reccomendations?

(BTW I'm specifically thinking about a Westerdn Digital 120GB/7200RPM drive I saw on newegg)

[icruise]

I'm not sure that there is a huge difference (although I've heard some bad things about Maxtor drives in general). Some people will swear that certain firewire chipsets are faster, so it might be worthwhile to look into that, but in general I would choose by price and features (pretty much identical across models, but some have both USB and firewire, better indicators, etc).

[Evangellydonut]

the internal drive matters if you decide to switch to a firewire 2 external enclosure...which i plan to do, so i'm only going with the WD1x00JB/BB series 'cuz they are faster and can take advantage of faster transfer speed later...

[Todd Corzett]

I just built up a 4-bay firewire case. I'm using two firewire bridgeboards I got from fwdepot.com (for more specifics look in the thread "firewire from two computers").

It is my opinion that 2.5" cases are EXTREMELY overpriced! The only advantage to a drive like this is that it is portable and is bus powered (great for laptops). If you're looking for something to put on your desktop you can get 3.5" enclosures, but they have only room for one drive, and only 3.5" hard drives.

If you choose to build your own case you're going to pay almost as much (if not more) for a one drive system. A bridgeboard costs $80... but you can hook two drives into it... this is where the savings comes in. If you ever wanted to hook up another IDE drive you can just pop it in for the cost of the drive... I do not know of any 3.5" double drive cases... so 5.25" it is!

If you need to put two devices or more into one case, building a 5.25" is the way to go. Not only do you get the ability to put CDRom or DVD drives into the case, but you can do it for less than the price of individual cases for each device.

Right now I have my 4 drive case setup with a 75GB HD, DVD Drive, Zip250, and an open bay. I don't have the money right now to put in the drives I want (4x120GB IBM), but I have the option of throwing all the other devices I have into it. I also have it setup with a temperature monitoring system and cooling fans... I'm not going to be backing up this sorage device so I want to make sure nothing overheats or anything (nothing EXTREMELY importiant going to be on it, but still...).

For most uses a single 3.5" will work nicely, but for those with drives and stuff laying around a multi-bay case and multiple firewire bridgeboards is the way to go.

-Todd...

[vsurfer]

OSX 10.1.5 doesn't see my Club Mac FW HD, so I'd want to make sure the drivers disk formatting sw that came with my next purchase were fully compatible.

In fact I'd only want a drive that could be formattted with Apple's formatitng utility, I think. At the time the literature on my drive insisted I use the accompanying Radialogic disk formatting software on it. I wonder if that's the reason it doesn't work in OSX, but works under OS9?

[israces]

If this helps, last weekend I decided it was time to get an external drive to back up all the crap I seem to amass on my PB. I looked at all the different external FW drives and all that and then I went to Circuit City just to see what they had. I ended up getting a Pyro drive kit with the Oxford 911 bridge that seems to be all the rage and a WD Caviar 80GB drive with the 8MB buffer from them, on sale. Took maybe 15 minutes to put it together at home and I have had absolutely no problems under 10.1.5 and 10.2.

Edit: After seeing the Labor Day ads in the paper this afternoon, I found that CompUSA had the same drive, but 120GB for less than I paid for the 80. After 4+ hours of zeroing data and exchanging a drive, I'm now $10 and 40GB better off.

[CaseCom]

Thanks to all who responded here. I ended up ordering a 60 GB d2 FireWire hard drive direct from LaCie. I've had it for a week now, and so far I recommend it.

-- OS X/Jaguar compatible (no drivers to install unless you need to run it under OS 9)

-- Quiet (too quiet...)

-- Looks nice, and has a stand for vertical set-up

-- 7200 rpm, and to my untrained eye it seems plenty fast