I recently paid a long-overdue visit to the Akihabara electronics district in Tokyo and brought back a few goodies. The main purchase was a Cutie DX firewire enclosure. It's hard to do a better job of photographing it than the standard
PR picture here, but I took a couple shots of my own.
The case is made of aluminum (brushed aluminum on the top and a sort of sand-blasted looking aluminum for the rest of the case). I think it will be a very good match for the new powerbooks (the grey pieces of plastic on the edges even match the grey plastic "gasket" that surrounds the screen and palmrest on the new books). This is certainly one of the better looking firewire enclosures I've seen -- too many of them look and feel cheap.
It was easy enough to put together -- four screws attach the drive to the circuit board, and then eight screws hold the top, bottom and middle pieces of the enclosure together. It included a 6pin to 6pin firewire cable, a 6pin to 4pin cable and a USB-to-AC cable (see below). No case was included, which is a little too bad.
There are two 6 pin firewire ports, allowing you to easily daisy-chain another device. There is also an AC adapter port, but the drive didn't come with an adapter (there is apparently one available). It did come with a USB-to-AC adapter cord that allows you to get power from the USB port, but for modern Macs it is not needed -- the drive runs fine from firewire bus power. There is a green power LED and a red disk access LED. The case is quite thin and light and feels good in the hand. I installed my 40GB IBM TravelstarGNX 5400rpm drive and it seems to work fine. I booting in Jaguar from the external drive with no problems. I haven't really tried any speed tests, but it uses the Oxford 911 chipset and seems quite fast. It was 9800 yen (around $80). I also saw a firewire/USB combo version of this enclosure made by a different company (wasn't called Cutie, but the case was identical) that sold for a little over $100, but I much prefer the dual 6pin ports.
At the same time, I also picked up this cute little firewire hub.
It's called the Slim Fire Repeater (sounds like what I get after too much Mexican food...) It is quite small as you can probably see from the picture. It has three 6pin firewire ports in front, and one 4pin port on the left and right sides, for 6 ports all together (not including the one you need to plug the hub into your computer). Interestingly it also matches the new powerbooks pretty well. It's so light that it feels almost like there is nothing inside.
As you may recall I posted a question about hubs and bus power devices a while back. With my new powerbook I will only have one firewire port, and I have a lot of devices, some that run on bus power (two firewire enclosures and an iPod) and I have some other devices which have passthough ports but won't supply power to connected devices. So I was most concerned about how this hub would handle supplying power. It comes with a very large AC adapter (several times larger than the hub itself) but I was very happy to discover that the hub will supply power to connected devices without being plugged in at all. As an experiment, I connected the Cutie hard drive and my ipod to the hub. Both received power with no problems (the Cutie ran fine and the iPod's battery started charging). I don't know if three bus-powered devices would too much for the device to power, but I will likely only use one at a time in any case.
This makes this little hub a great choice for those who need to use multiple firewire devices on the road. It was only about $25. It seems to be distributed in Japan by a company called MDS, but from looking at their Japanese website they seem to have gone out of business. The name "Datafab" is on the bottom and it is made in Taiwan -- don't know if this is available anywhere in the US.
Oh, I also got this neat little iPod stand:
It was about $13, but I saw it for $10 at another store just after buying it.
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