[croops]

Sup,

I'm after an external HDD for 3 specific purposes:

- backing up data
- storing my photos from iPhoto
- streaming music from via PS3 > MacBook Pro > External HDD wirelessly
- streaming video from PS3 wirelessly (when Sony decide to release the right firmware )

500GB ideal and Firewire would be nice.

I've been looking at the WD MyBooks but I am unsure about their (network) performance on Macs...

Any suggestions?

[mduell]

500GB Seagate hard drive ($120) + Well rated (4 or 5 'eggs' with 10+ votes) that you like the look of ($25-60)

[cgc]

Search the forums, I saw a LOT of recent threads about this. I got an external enclosure that rox. Check out this thread.

Excerpt:

I bought this external Firewire 400/800 with USB 2 and ESATA enclosure. Very well built and very fast. Love it.

Paid $99 for the enclosure and $59 for a 250GB Western Digital SATA2 drive to put in it.

[shifuimam]

We should make a sticky about this - it's gotten asked multiple times recently.

$100 for a USB/FireWire enclosure seems a bit steep. Unless you've got a serious need for eSATA, there's no reason to invest extra $$ for it.

Here's one for $20 on Amazon - USB 2.0 + FireWire, aluminum casing, built-in cooling fan, screwless assembly. It's gotten good reviews, too.

[croops]

Thanx for the replies guys... I think I may have caused some confusion though!

What I meant was that I was after an External Storage device!

These Western Digital ones are a good example... i.e either the Desktop or Remote Access ones...

Sorry for the mix up!

[shifuimam]

That's what we're talking about. An external drive is just a regular hard drive stuck in a case that converts the hard drive connection (IDE or SATA) to USB and/or FireWire.

The benefit to buying the case and drive separately is that the drive will then come with a full warranty. External drives sold by Western Digital, Maxtor, Seagate, and others generally come with a one-year warranty. When you buy a Seagate drive an then go get an enclosure for it, the drive comes with the standard five-year warranty. It makes a big difference, especially if your drive fails on you.

It's also cheaper - you can get a good Seagate hard drive for under $100, and you shouldn't have to pay more than about $30 for an enclosure. Fry's, in fact, is having a sale that ends today on Seagate SATA hard drives - 400GB for $90. A USB 2.0 SATA drive enclosure like this one from NewEgg will run you $20. So, for $110 you have an external hard drive, compared to $160 MSRP for the Western Digital MyBook 40GB external drive.

You can buy a read-to-go external drive if you really want, but you'll be wasting money and getting a crappy warranty.

[NobleMatt]

wow thanks for the heads up about the Warrenty Diffrence, thats made me change my plans. Anyone from the Uk then Suggest good place to get parts from, or are we all just gonna say ebuyer?

Matt

[cgc]

Originally Posted by shifuimam 

$100 for a USB/FireWire enclosure seems a bit steep. Unless you've got a serious need for eSATA, there's no reason to invest extra $$ for it.

I wanted FW800 and liked the way it looked next to my MacPro and read enough great reviews I decided to buy it.

If you are happy with that black enclosure then go for it but I recommend finding out what chipset they use to bridge the Firewire/USB with the SATA as some companies use generic chipsets and/or use chipsets with limitations or bugs.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by shifuimam 

We should make a sticky about this - it's gotten asked multiple times recently.

$100 for a USB/FireWire enclosure seems a bit steep. Unless you've got a serious need for eSATA, there's no reason to invest extra $$ for it.

Here's one for $20 on Amazon - USB 2.0 + FireWire, aluminum casing, built-in cooling fan, screwless assembly. It's gotten good reviews, too.

That enclosure doesn't mention what chipset it's using for the FireWire conversion. Most of the time, when they don't tell you what it is, that means it's using the Prolific chipset, which is known not only for poor performance, but also for actually corrupting drives.

If you are just getting a USB 2.0 enclosure, the cheap ones are fine, but for FireWire, you need to make sure you have a good chipset, and the chipsets that are considered the best are the ones from Oxford Semiconductor. They do cost more, but my advice would be to look for an enclosure that uses an Oxford chipset if you're going FireWire.

With that said, here's the one I have:

OWC Mercury Elite-AL Quad Interface eSATA,... (MEFW924AL1K) at OWC

Not the cheapest around, but really nice. They have a few other models that get a bit cheaper by leaving out things like eSATA and FW800, too.

These are neat too:

NewerTech miniStack v3 eSATA/FireWire/USB2.... (FWU2ESMSV3) at OWC

One thing you need to be aware of is what kind of drive the enclosure takes. Some drives use regular old ATA drives (also known as Parallel ATA, or PATA), and some use Serial ATA drives (also known as SATA). If you get a PATA enclosure, you need to put a PATA drive in it, and if you get a SATA enclosure, you need to put a SATA drive in it. Check the information for the enclosure before you buy the wrong type of drive for it (with the enclosures that support eSATA, though, it's a pretty safe bet that they'll use SATA drives).

Installing a drive in a decent quality enclosure is not difficult at all, and you'll be able to do it with no trouble as long as you can operate a screwdriver. It's definitely the route I'd go, rather than buying one of those pre-made external hard drives. You'll know for sure that you're getting a good quality drive this way, and you can get that 5-year Seagate warranty, which is always nice. Plus, you can tell your friends you built the hard drive yourself, which might impress them if they're not computer people.

[croops]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

With that said, here's the one I have:

OWC Mercury Elite-AL Quad Interface eSATA,... (MEFW924AL1K) at OWC

Not the cheapest around, but really nice. They have a few other models that get a bit cheaper by leaving out things like eSATA and FW800, too.

I like this solution. Can you recommend a hard disk or two that would fit this enclosure, i.e what specs am I looking for? Ideally I am looking at 500GB.

Thanx heaps!

[mduell]

Originally Posted by croops 

I like this solution. Can you recommend a hard disk or two that would fit this enclosure, i.e what specs am I looking for? Ideally I am looking at 500GB.

Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (Perpendicular Recording) ST3500630AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

[JoshuaZ]

While on that topic... how about a nice big 1TB drive? I already have two 250s, and would like to ditch them in favor of two 500s or one 1TB drive. Any ideas? (Firewire would be nice compared to USB)

[mduell]

Originally Posted by JoshuaZ 

While on that topic... how about a nice big 1TB drive? I already have two 250s, and would like to ditch them in favor of two 500s or one 1TB drive. Any ideas? (Firewire would be nice compared to USB)

They're pretty pricey now ($400), but 3 other brands should be on the market soon and push down prices. Or you can go with 750GB for $230. Compatible Firewire enclosures for the 750GB are linked to in my first post. For the 1TB you'll need an enclosure with SATA, which are a tad more expensive.

[cgc]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

That enclosure doesn't mention what chipset it's using for the FireWire conversion. Most of the time, when they don't tell you what it is, that means it's using the Prolific chipset, which is known not only for poor performance, but also for actually corrupting drives.

If you are just getting a USB 2.0 enclosure, the cheap ones are fine, but for FireWire, you need to make sure you have a good chipset, and the chipsets that are considered the best are the ones from Oxford Semiconductor. They do cost more, but my advice would be to look for an enclosure that uses an Oxford chipset if you're going FireWire.

One thing you need to be aware of is what kind of drive the enclosure takes. Some drives use regular old ATA drives (also known as Parallel ATA, or PATA), and some use Serial ATA drives (also known as SATA).
...

That's what I meant to say The enclosure I referenced uses the Oxford924 chipset.

[shifuimam]

According to geeks.com, that San Max enclosure does indeed have a Prolific PL3507 chipset.

I'm guessing I'll be hard up to find an enclosure that uses a good chipset for under $25..

<edit>
This post mentions updating the firmware on the chipset to fix 10.3.9 issues. Think it's worth a shot, or not worth the risk?
</edit>

[CharlesS]

That post is talking about a different problem. Unfortunately, for FireWire, if you want a reliable drive (which, for a backup, you generally do), you want an Oxford chipset (Initio is probably all right too, since Macally uses them). If you're content with USB 2.0-only, you can get a good chipset for a lot less - what you'd give up would be a small amount of speed vs. FW400 (obviously, there's a larger speed gap vs. FW800 and eSATA), and PPC bootability (although it'll boot fine on Intel).

Once Macs ship with eSATA standard, this will be a lot easier, of course, because eSATA doesn't require a chipset at all to convert signals - eSATA basically is SATA with a different connector, so all you really need for an enclosure, if I understand properly, is a power supply for the drive and an adapter to convert the SATA connector to an eSATA connector. The result is that with eSATA, you would be able to get any cheap enclosure out there and it wouldn't make any difference whatsoever (except for build quality of the case itself and cooling). And of course the speed would be faster than anything else, due to not having to convert the signal. If only Apple would just put eSATA ports on their machines (or give us a slot so we can add our own)...

There are some cheaper Oxford enclosures than the ones that cdc and I mentioned, though. For example, this one from OWC is only $45, although it's FW400-only, with no FW800 or USB 2.0. They also have this one for $55 that has both FireWire and USB 2.0, but it's pretty ugly.

Another thing about the more expensive enclosures besides the ports and chipset is the material the case itself is made of. The better ones tend to be made of aluminum, which disperses heat much better than plastic and will probably help prevent your drive from overheating.

With all that said, if you really want something under $30, I found this one. Unfortunately, reviews around the Internet claim that the case itself is flimsy and that you have to be very careful when putting the drive in, and also that its fan is obnoxiously noisy (whereas many of the aluminum enclosures you will find are fanless due to the aluminum case's ability to dissipate the heat from the drive).

Oh, one other thing - for those who are looking at 1 TB drives, make sure your enclosure supports a drive of that size. Many of them state that they only allow a 500 GB or 750 GB drive to be used. I don't know if that's due to heat requirements or what, but it's worth considering.

[croops]

Thanx guys.

I've looked into the external drive option and if I was to head down the enclosure that includes the Oxford chipset and is capable of FW800 it will cost me $AU139. On top of that, the compatible HDD itself will cost me $AU179 giving me a total of $AU318.

On the other hand, if I went down the prebuilt solution, i.e a My Book™ Pro Edition™ 500GB with triple interface, this can be had for $276.

Decisions! I'll need to think about it...

Last question, for a MacBookPro that will run boot camp, what would be the best way to format a 500GB drive?

[cgc]

I too considered a pre-built option but decided against it as I don't know the quality of the drive within and my warranty would have been lesser (as pointed out by someone else).

[Faust]

This is a very informative and helpful thread. Thanks for posting. I, too, am looking for a good external HDD solution and Charles S. has convinced me that I get one of those OWC Elite enclosures.

[viper89]

+1 for this thread, maybe sticky? I was going with a pre-built untill i saw this thread. Im not very computer savy but, can some one explain to me what the SATA, ESATA and RAID are.

[hojo]

Certainly buying the enclosure separately from the drive makes the most sense.

One other option to consider, if you don't mind the rather outrageous expense, is a SATADock from Weibetech. I'be been using a similar ComboDock for years- you just plug the USB/Firewire adapter into any old bare drive and it becomes an external drive. It doesn't have a cool-looking metal box to sit in, but you can switch the thing from bare drive to bare drive, essentially turning ANY size SATA drive into an external HDD in about 15 seconds. I used their Combo dock for backups on my 3 old PCs - one drive per machine using any old IDE drive I had sitting around. Now I use it as a network drive on my Firewire extreme with some old WD 120 gig drivethat I had sitting a drawer.

HUMONGOUS picture linked here

[CharlesS]

Eesh, $170 just to have an exposed bare drive on your desk? You can do the same thing just by using any old enclosure and leaving the top off.

Also, could you please resize that picture? It has made the thread way too wide.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Also, could you please resize that picture? It has made the thread way too wide.

The obvious solution is to buy a 30" LCD.

[shifuimam]

One other chipset question...I've got a couple of enclosures from AirLink101 that I really like (one each USB 2.0 3.5" and 5.25" for a hard drive and a DVD-RW). They've got a Firewire/USB combo enclosure. I sent support a ticket asking what chipset it uses, and they told me it uses "Initio's INIC-1530L usb/firewire combo chipset". Is this any good? More reliable than Prolific?

[CharlesS]

I don't know much about Initio, but Macally uses them, so if you look up reviews for Macally enclosures you might be able to get some idea of how well it works. I think Initio would probably be okay, though. Prolific is the one to avoid. Oxford does have the reputation of having the best performance, though, so something else might not be quite as fast, if you care about that.

Hojo, could you please fix that picture?

[funkboy]

I ordered the OWC Aluminum drive. Is it very quiet? I really hope so... I think that's a consideration for Mac users: what is the best quietest drive out there? Something that would not make much more noise than my near-silent Mac mini.

[CharlesS]

Well, a fanless enclosure will make no extra noise at all. In that case, the only thing determining how much noise it makes will be the drive itself. My Seagate is pretty quiet, so if you get one of those as I recommended, you should be good to go.