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tvincent · Feb 8, 2002, 09:54 AM

I'm interested in purchasing an external firewire hard drive for my iMac/PowerBook. Does anyone have suggestions of good manufactures and models? I'd like at least 60 gigs and I want the drive to be powered by the firewire cable itself. Of course, I'd also like the drive to be a small size, look pretty, and not cost a fortune.

Thanks for your help!

PeteWK · Feb 9, 2002, 02:59 AM

Dude, you are out of luck. As for bus powered, that kills your whole plan. There is only one 2.5 inch drive on the market that holds 60 gig and that's a 500+ dollar IBM. Bus powered drives are the smaller laptop types that don't need much power. The IBM drive can be had in any number of cases for about 625 dollars.

Bottom line is that a good bus powered case costs between 90 and 130 dollars. The drives for them run from about $80 for a 10 gig to $115 for a 20 gig, $150-175 for a 30 gig, $235 for a 40 gig and $325 for a 48 gig drive.

You could find slightly higher or lower prices depending on how good you are at web surfing.

PeteWK

Macola · Feb 9, 2002, 10:29 AM

Originally posted by tvincent:
<STRONG>I'm interested in purchasing an external firewire hard drive for my iMac/PowerBook. Does anyone have suggestions of good manufactures and models? I'd like at least 60 gigs and I want the drive to be powered by the firewire cable itself. Of course, I'd also like the drive to be a small size, look pretty, and not cost a fortune.

Thanks for your help!</STRONG>

Having it bus-powered does limit your options a lot. I would recommend buying the case from OWC; you can buy a 2.5" drive there also, or use a shopping bot to find a good price.

agentz · Feb 9, 2002, 10:47 AM

Lacie now do a 60Gb of the bus-powered Firewire/USB2 Pocketdrive. The part number is 300190 but AFAIK its pretty expensive. Try Lacie Pocketdrives for more info.

fulmer · Feb 9, 2002, 10:57 AM

if you're going external firewire, then I'd go with speed and space. 7200 RPM or more would be nice. These drives aren't expensive, and if you buy your own enclosure, then you've got a huge amount of space at a good price. However, it would require its own power source, not bus power.

maybe you could find what you're looking for on ebay.

BTP · Feb 9, 2002, 11:03 AM

There are other opions open to you. You can buy a 2.5 enclosure for $100 or less and you can buy a 48GB 9mm drive for about $330. I know you wanted 60GB, but that is a big as I found in a 2.5" drive. This would be small (fit in your hand) and weigh somewhere around a pound or less. There are a few 2.5" enclosures that can be bus powered or use an adapter. One such place for enclosures is coolmacstuff.com and they have enclosures for 2.5" drives and 3.5" drives. These drives from coolmacstuff come from Ingram Micro and I would guess they are the same drive enclosures as in this review. The 2.5" drive can run off of bus power, but the 3.5 cannot. I don't know of 3.5" drives that can run off of bus power, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

If you went with the 3.5" enclosure, you could put in an IBM Deskstar 120GB for $269. Add the enclosure for $99, and you have some serious, fast storage.

You can also buy the entire thing from anyplace, but you'll save some $$ putting it together yourself, which is really easy. If you want to search the web for more hard drive prices, you should search Pricewatch.

Good luck.

edit: spellin'

[ 02-09-2002: Message edited by: BTP ]

tvincent · Feb 9, 2002, 11:11 AM

Thanks for the suggestions! It looks like I won't be going for bus powered now because of its size limitations and price. So how about suggestions for an external drive that is not bus powered?

zigzag · Feb 9, 2002, 11:57 AM

The best source of info for Firewire drives that I've seen is www.barefeats.com . They've done many tests over the last few months on drives and enclosures of all sizes. They've said that they're testing a Maxtor 3000DV but they haven't posted the results yet.

Another good source of info is www.xlr8yourmac.com .

If you want to buy your own enclosure and put a drive in it, the best prices I've seen for drives are at www.newegg.com and www.googlegear.com .

If you want a small 3.5" enclosure, I'd go with an OWC or a ready-made Maxtor or Western Digital. Some of the other enclosures, like the Granite, are larger.

Timo · Feb 9, 2002, 12:08 PM

I've got a Granite Digital enclosure with an IBM drive inside.

Whatever you do, make sure your FW enclosure or drive has the Oxford 911 IDE/FW bridgeboard. It's faster; there's some info about it at barefeets.com.

I went with Granite because their case has two fans, they had the 911 bridgeboard, and their tech support was very helpful. When it wasn't immediately obvious to me how to hook up the drive, they answered a quick question. They have also reliably posted firmware updates for the bridgeboard to e.g. accommodate OS X or drives larger than 120 GB.

BTP · Feb 9, 2002, 05:51 PM

The ones I mentioned both have the Oxford 911, at least that is what the review says and I asked coolmacstuff.com as well. Their 3.5 enclosure is only $100, making it one of the cheapest 911 3.5 enclosures that looks good. There is also the ADS Pyro for about the same money, but is is a lot bigger, as it houses 5.25" devices. If you want just a 3.5" HD enclosure, that one looks like the winner. If you want to put in bigger stuff, the ADS is a nice piece of software. Throw in that IBM 120GB Deskstar and for $368 plus tax, shipping/handling you have a kick ass storage system.

I agree with the mention of barefeats and xlr8yourmac, good resources.

Eug · Feb 9, 2002, 10:12 PM

As far as I can tell, the OWComputing.com, the Transintl.com, and the CoolMacStuff.com drives are all exactly the same case, and now use the 911 chipset.

I got my enclosure with drive from Transintl.com. They seemed helpful and courteous. They don't know much about PCs but nonetheless they didn't try to give some half-assed answer about PC support either. The drive looks good, and has a cool blue light.

It's been running for several days straight with no problems.

I got my drive HFS+ formatted. I've reformatted it to FAT32 for use with both Windows and Mac OS X. Speeds are good, at least in Windows:

[ 02-10-2002: Message edited by: Eug ]

Severed Hand of Skywalker · Feb 9, 2002, 11:18 PM

Eug, you had better be careful about posting XP screenshots around here

And I remember you making fun of me when I mentioned that my Zip drive had a cool blue light!

BTP · Feb 10, 2002, 02:12 AM

But that was before blue lights were cool.

tullamore · Feb 10, 2002, 03:35 AM

I have an external 100GB drive from OWComputing and wow, it looks great. The drive is very fast I record all of my DV video to it so that I don't loose frames like I did on the internal drive and it looks great, did I say that already. You won't be disappointed.

BTW The one problem I did have is that until the latest update to MacOS X my firewire Formac studio would interfere with the drive when I used them at the same time. There was some sort of firewire problem in the earlier versions of X. It worked fine in 9 and now works great in X too.

BTP · Feb 10, 2002, 03:54 AM

Just recalled that I saw a Western Digital caviar 7200 for about $179 (Outpost.com), which would give you a cheaper option ($278+tax+s/h). I like the IBM drives, but the WD is cheaper...