[TFunkadelic]

So, I need to get an external hard drive. The only port I have open on my powerbook is a firewire 800 port, so I'm looking to get a firewire 800 case, then put a hard drive in it. I have a few hard drives sitting around from when I used a PC ( they are all windows xp formatted) and I was wondering if I were to hook it up to my comp with one of those in there, if it would let me format it.

[mduell]

You can attach a FW400 enclosure to your FW800 port with a cheap adapter. The performance is obviously lower, but the price difference is significant.
I like this FW800 enclosure ($90, Oxford chipset), and this FW400 enclosure ($28, Oxford chipset).

Yes, you can put your old drives in and format them. You can even read the data off of your NTFS partitions if you'd like to.

[TFunkadelic]

Thanks, that's the case I was planning on (the 800...I want it to respond as close to a normal hard drive as possible).

[mduell]

If your old drive is SATA you'll have to find a differnet enclosure. Most enclosures only support ATA drives (and don't have room for an adapter).