[neilw]

I've (almost) in possession of a bare CDRW drive that I want to put into a firewire enclosure. Can anyone recommend one that's quiet and not too expensive?

I also can't seem to figure out if an internal supply is a good thing or not. Nice to have it integrated, but I would think it necessitates more cooling in the case, and hence noisier. I'm not even sure if CDRW drives really require a lot of cooling or not. I'd sure like the thing to be quiet if possible....

[Mako]

You can buy virtualy any Firewire external case, and use it with a CD-RW. Be warned that the Oxford 911 chipset do little or nothing for optical drives, so don't get sidetracked on that. Oxford 911 just adds ATA-100 support for harddrives and takes advantage of fast transfer speeds that only harddrives can achieve.

Internal or external power supply depends on: do you want the case bulkier, but no wall-wart or bulky power converter on the floor, or do you want a little bit trimmer case, with a bulky external power supply? Either does the same thing really.

You'd be fine removing or disabling the fan in the FW case. As long as the case has some ventalation, a CD-RW drive doesn't produce enough heat to be damaged without a fan, not even close. It will in fact be signifcantly cooler inside an external FW case without a fan than inside a tower with a hot processor and other drives, with several fans dispercing the heat in the tower. I've actually measured the difference, and have been using external optical drives with no fans for years.

Just find where the fan is plugged in to either the firewire bridge, or the internal power supply, and unplug it.

There's no reason for an external optical drive to be noisy. They include a fan in these cases for use with harddrives. For an optical drive, not needed at all.

[HouseSold]

Currently added a TDK VeloCD 24x10x40 CDRW to a case from Cooldrives at:
http://www.cooldrives.com/fir13oxcden.html

Good price, no tax and fair shipping. Works excellent and noticed speed difference while plugging in an ATA Maxtor 40 gb ($99 at Costco) to move data.

Also ordered another case from Compuvest at:
http://www.compuvest1.com/engine/default800.asp?56426

Great price ($68) for firewire case (bought from Compuvest before).

Best Deal of all for another computer was here:
http://www.caldrives.com/Merchant2/m...41040sanyo-pci

24x10x40 Sanyo in Firewire 911 enclosure (I know chipset is more useful in HD's than in optical drives) and comes with no charge PCI-firewire card ($40 value)

Speak to Walter and mention us at MacNN. $185 is good price.

Prices seem to get better all the time.

[neilw]

Thanks for the amazingly helpful responses. That Compuvest case sure is priced attractively, though I'd like to know who makes it. The Cooldrives enclosure looks very nice, but I don't need to pay the extra for Oxford 911 for the CDRW.

The other one I'm looking at is the ADS Pyro 1394 kit, which looks pretty good at $90 except for it's color, which I can live with. Anyone have experience with this one?

[Rob661]

Hi, HouseSold,

Is veloCD working fine with the enclosure?

I put the same velocd 24/10/40 into ADS Pyro Firewire drive kit, but I'm having problems like;
- iTunes 2.0.3 doesn't recognize the drive. (both OS 9 and X)
- Toast 5.0.2 in OS9 and Toast PB2 for OS X recognizes the drive, but doesn't burn properly. (Somehow, the burning process stalls at the end and freezee my mac in case of OS9.)

I'm wondering if you are having the same problem or not. I contacted TDK and they said they are working to resolve the issue, though.

Could you share your experience with the drive?

[HouseSold]

Saw the ADS enclosure at Fry's; passed on color, passed on bulkiness.

The CDRW from Caldrives (see above) is burning as we speak.(Toast 5.02) on iMac DVSE flawlessly and coasterless.

I had a QPS CDRW (Acer mechanism) for an hour and had the same error incompletion on the last track (error -50). A 1 hour wait for QPS tech support revealed "I dunno, we only support PeeCee's, even though we sell a firewire enclosed CDRW". They also knew by serial number whether Acer, Plextor or LiteOn mechanism fitted to the drive setup.

TDK, even over the new Yamaha, is my own preference for reliabilty (It just works.

Tim Yeh, at TDK, is incredibily helpful and responsive.(Mac only)

The VeloCD is a touch quicker (also firewire and 911 Oxford setup enclosure)

I haven't done iTunes 2.03 (only 2.02) to answer you exactly.

Toast 5.01 (supplied with VeloCD) updates to 5.02 at Roxio's site.