Inside every enclosure, is a small firewire to ATA controller something like this one:
When you buy from Lacie or QPS all you're really paying for is the bridge board, the internal drive+ useless addons like custom faceplates, brand name stencils and custom firmware revisions. Plus the enclosure itself, which amounts to an empty lump of plastic.
I've noticed that the major stencilers have taken to such add-ons as USB AND Firewire controller boards to jack up the price a bit, but really if you don't need a slow USB interface, don't pay for it. If you do, you can still save money buying an enclosure that includes it.
Personally I hate the crap shoot of what drive mech is inside... I know it's only an internal device that Lacie or QPS has aquired, dicked with, stuffed in a case, and is now selling me with their add-ons for a price that's generally much more than I could get the same device for myself, or even a better one.
Get firewire enclosures that offer the best performance features (IE: 911 chipset for harddrives) put great quality components in the case that you've got yourself for less $$ (use a site like
www.pricewatch.com to get the best prices on things, or atleast figure a good ballpark for what you should pay)and you've got the same or better performance than the stencilers will sell you.
I think many people just like to think of an external drive as one complete package and perhaps get nervous at the thought of buying two seperate peices (IE the enclosure and the internal drive) and putting them together. That or many people probably don't realize that an 'external' drive is just a converted 'internal' and that internal devices by themselves generally run way cheaper than ones that have been 'externalized'. Other people I think get bamboozled by the thought of 'tech support' although I've honestly never in my life needed tech support for something like a CD-RW drive or a harddrive. I can't even imagine what I'd need to call someone for. As for warrantees, the enclosure and the internal device should have it's own from wherever it was purchaced.
So yes, I think it's mostly convience that keeps external drives a hot item.
Hey, can't blame Lacie and QPS for doing what they do though, it's a good business. I do the same thing myself in fact (dunno why I'm giving it away!) - I buy seperate internal drives and enclosures at great prices, put them together and sell them to various clients for $50 to $100 profit each and STILL manage to undercut the stencilers prices!
Strides made in the enclosure world? There are some interesting things. You can buy ATA to Firewire bridge boards that controll more than one device, put them in older SCSI enclosures and build some really cool multiple harddrive or CD-RW + Harddrive devices that don't really exist elsewhere. Finding goof price deals on the ATA bridges and the older SCSI enclosures can be hard though, but they are out there.
I recently converted the 24x burner in one of my PCs to what I call an 'internal-external'. I was thinking 'I know this drive works with both Mac and PCs (as most any of them do) but I don't really want another external Firewire case and yet another burner for my G4 (which only has a DVD drive). So I got a firewire bridge board for $35 and attached it to the CD-RW inside the PC and ran firewire cables from the bridge board to a firewire port on the front of the PC (an $18 floppy drive-sized port extender box). One firewire cable runs from the Mac, and another runs from the PC, and either one plugs into the front of the PC to use the same CD-RW. It's kind of strange to be burning a CD on the Mac from a drive housed in the PC, but the setup works perfectly, either machine can use the CD-RW drive now, essentially doubling it's value to me.
Top
