[jabaro]

What are the pros and cons of and/or differences between the Prolific PL3507 chipset and the the Oxford 911 chipset

[Falcobramblewoo]

The Prolific PL-3057 chipset is crap! I have gone through 4 enclosures using the chipset, FireWire did not work at all on any of them, and after updating the firmware, USB2.0 died as well. If you want both USB2.0 and FireWire, do not get a enclosure with the Prolific PL-3057 chipset, it's not worth the savings!

[Macola]

I second the crappiness of the Prolific chipset, at least with Firewire. Go with an Oxford-based chipset instead.

[Pao|o]

i'm using said chipset with no problem. will probably go oxford-based so i can make bootable drives.

[Tomchu]

I've used a Prolific PL3507-based enclosure with a 300 GB IDE drive over both Firewire and USB 2.0 for *months* on both a Mac and a Windows XP PC ... it's been rock-solid the entire time.

[Pao|o]

Also used a Prolific PL3507-based enclosure on a 320GB IDE drive on FW400 since last year and it does what I need it to do on both OS X 10.4.7 & WinXP SP2. Though I've done my research and it appears that you'd be better off using a OXFW911plus-based (aka Oxford 911 Plus or Oxford 911+) enclosure if you want better speeds, bootability, no problems using it with Macs & the ability to handle more than 137GB or 300GB drives.

I searched on macsales.com and found the "Oxford 911+" or "Oxford 911 Plus" chipsets are found in the following drives

"OWC Mercury Elite"

"OWC Neptune" = Has no USB ports

"OWC Mercury Elite -AL FW400+USB2"

"NewerTech miniStack V2"