[apollo11]

I've managed to acquire several 3.5 inch IDE drives varying from 120 to 300 gigs.

These are useful sizes. I would run out of ports if I boxed each one individually to connect to my MBP or G4 iMac.

Is there a cheaper single enclosure that will house all the drives and allow access with a single cable FW &/or USB ? I live in the UK.

I seem to recall that individually boxed drives be chained like SCSI, is this easy & reliable or not?

[Cadaver]

Virtually all FireWire drive cases have a daisy-chain port on them; a single FireWire bus supports up to 63 devices if I remember correctly. There will be no significant performance drop with multiple drives chained to one FireWire port unless you're trying to access multiple drives simultaneously.

There are several vendors who sell multi-drive external FireWire cases (though any links I could provide wouldn't be useful in the UK). Multi-drive cases tend to cost more than single drive cases, obviously, but depending on how many drives you'll be using, one multi-drive case may be less than 4+ single drive cases (and likely will need only one wall AC plug instead of multiple). Or, if you plan to disconnect/reconnect some frequently, you might want to consider individual cases for each.