[Dr.Michael]

Hi folks,

I want to buy an external firewire hd. I have read about the lacie in this forum and it seems to be a great and silent drive.

But what about the sarotech hardbox for 3.5 inch drives? Its cheaper and looks very cool (also alu like the lacie). And you have the choice which hd you put in. Lacie comes with an unspecified internal drive.

The bottom line is, with the sarotech hardbox you get more GB for your money.

My questions: Is sarotech fast? And, more important, is it silent?

[Ambassadeur]

Originally posted by Dr.Michael:
The bottom line is, with the sarotech hardbox you get more GB for your money.

My questions: Is sarotech fast? And, more important, is it silent?

Maybe no answer to your Sarotech questions, rather more general towards external drives:

Building your own external drive normally tends to be cheaper than buying a complete one, so yes, more GBs for your money.

And for fast: Doesn't this depend mostly on the drive mechanism you put into the enclosure? The bridge chips are mostly standard I'd assume.

Silent: Do all external HDD enclosures require a fan? (at least the 3.5 inch ones?) I am running a notebook HDD in a 2.5 clear enclosure without a fan, so the only noise is the harddrive spinning. I guess that's as silent as they get. Plus, it's bus-powered, so no annoying power adapter or cable and it powers up together with the mac.

[Dr.Michael]

It seems, no-one uses Sarotech :o)

In the meantime I wrote an email to a trusted dealer. He replied the Sarotech box has a fan but it runs very silent.

2.5 inch drives are indeed without fan (I have a dvico momobay@work) and they are really silent. But the available capacities are simply too small for my backup purpose.

[Eug]

I have a Sarotech Cutie case for my 2.5" drive. Very nice.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

We have many LaCie drives and they have been 100% reliable for years.

[Dr.Michael]

ok, now I can myself answer my question.

In the meantime I have bought a black Sarotech hardbox for a 3.5 inch drive and a Samsung 160 GB, 8MB, 7200RPM disk.

I have found tests where the Samsung drive was the most silent hd available (0.6 sone compared to 1.7 sone for a hitachi with the same speed). Silence was important for me. And the Samsung fits well to the speed of the firewire 400 connection (48 MBytes/sec as average read/write rate).

So the choice for the internal drive was my main reason to buy the Sarotech case instead of the Lacie where I could not know whats inside.
The Sarotech case is ok. On the photos it looks so perfectly like alu that I did not think it could be PLASTIC. It is. But since I have taken the black one (instead of silver metal look) it still looks good. The silver box would have looked like if you try to make plastic look like metal - CHEAP - I am sure. Maybe a little bit too cheap for the 100 bucks that it costs.

But the good news: its very silent. It has a fan, but all I hear is a gentle hummm. And part of the hummm comes from the disk. Inside the case there are bumpers to damp vibrations. The same beneath the stand. Soft bumpers also here. So there is no sound conduction to the table.

And the power supply is included.

The whole box is only slightly warm although I have used it for 4 hours now (backup).

Hm, I think the Lacie cases look cooler. But my old Lacie drive (a blue USB 1) is very noisy, the same as my Lacie firewire burner. This maybe improved now.

The Sarotech box works great. It will do its job very well. So no complaints, but also no overwhelming joy.

I will update my post as soon as I have speed measurements.
I hope this is useful for someone.

[Dr.Michael]

Still no replys but 22 more views since yesterday.
So I will go on with my monolog.

I have measured the speed:
I copied my 6 GB mp3 folder as it is (347 files) and as a tarball (one file, same size as all 347 together) onto the Sarotech drive.

Results: 21.5 MByte/sec (au nature), 22.33 MByte/sec as tarball.

I see some of you reading this, grinning and thinking: when is he going to find out what he did. I have now: I measured the speed of my Powerbooks internal drive (which is slow. I would have liked a 5400 RPM drive that I already had in my Pismo and TiBook. But Apple did not offer one for the 12 inch machine).

So the information is: The combination of Samsung drive and Sarotech box is great for a Powerbook. If you upgrade your internal drive it will be instantly faster :0).

Noise again:
I executed a shellscript this morning that copied all my backups from my old Lacie USB drive to the Samsung drive. It took the whole day while I was in the lab.

When I came back home I heard a damn noise. It came from the fan of the Sarotech case. It was by far louder than the Lacie drive (really bad). The fan, that was running very silent at the beginning developed a bad noise within one single day of operation.

Since it was blowing only cold air I opened the case and disconnected the fan. Maybe I will buy a new one. Now it sounds great and is still not warm at all.
I'll see if I give back the case or get a better fan. It should not cost me more than 10 Euros/USD.

Result: The Samsung drive is great, hardly audible. The Sarotech Hardbox looks cheap and contains cheap parts.

I really cannot recommend the Sarotech case after this.

[Dr.Michael]

Originally posted by Dr.Michael:


I really cannot recommend the Sarotech case after this.

Some days later the fan is completely quiet. The drive runs now nonstop and is hardly audible (the gentle humm is back :o) ).

Maybe the case was not perfect so that the fan grinded for some hours. This is gone now. No fan replacement necessary.

Now I must say the case will do a good job. No reason anymore not to buy Sarotech. Sorry for the too quick judgement.

[SSharon]

I recently bought an aluminum coolmax usb2.0/firewire enclosure to use with a 160gb 8mb 7200rpm drive and I love the enclosure. I hear the drive spin up and down but thats it. there is no fan so the case gets a bit hot, but even after constantly writing to it (I d/l every futurama episode off of my schools network) for three hours it still didn't burn me. I have it sitting vertically also so that may help.

the combo enclosure was expensive but their firewire only case is about 30 bucks from newegg in case anyone here is in the market.

oh yea, and it copies 1.8gb in under a minute off a 7200rpm 120gb maxtor 2mb cache (boot drive).