Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

I am looking for a enclosure for a 2.5" SATA preferably Hard Drive. In the past I've always used the Lacie Rugged Hard Drives but to save money I decided this time to buy my own hard drive and case and then I will upgrade it and hopefully save money in the future going this route. I am interested in getting the 500GB Hitachi Travelstar 5K500 which is SATA. I'm using this with a Mac Pro but for being futureproof I want USB 2.0, Firewire 400, and Firewire 800. I'll be doing backups to it using SuperDuper. I want the small size since it's store in a safe and space is limited so desktop size hard drives are out. Any suggestions of a good rugged enclosure that will work well on the Mac?

It's going to be difficult to find anything other than USB and eSATA in a 2.5" enclosure.

1394b and SATA aren't a very popular combination for 2.5" enclosures for a variety of reasons.

OWC has one for $90. FW Depot has one for $120.

miniXpress825 S offers F800, F400, eSATA, and USB 2.0. I got the miniXpress825 and not bad at all.

For me, the OWC is the only way to go. I've had one for a year and have had zero problems. Plus it comes with 800-800, 800-400, USB and an AC/DC adapter, that most 2.5 USB HDs do not include.

Not only are the products fantastic quality and has great reputation for reliability, macsales.com is very active with their support and are a great resource to the Apple world.

I don't know how "futureproof" FireWire 800 will be. It's faster, but to say that it hasn't found very widespread adoption would be something of an understatement. FW800 may end up in that great grooveyard of forgotten formats that were really cool, but just never went anywhere. And trust me - I say that as someone who still has a sizable collection of SVHS tapes, laserdiscs, and SACDs.

I myself have a MacAlly PHR-250CC, which has USB and FireWire 400, and encloses a PATA 2.5"drive. It even still fits in the very nice case I got with my previous hard drive enclosure, a Vantec NEXSTAR.

The reason it never went anywhere was because Apple thought it was a high-end feature for some reason and never included it in any but their most expensive machines. As a result, it's a high-end feature that no one uses. :/ I wouldn't say it's any less future-proof than FW400, though, since FW800 drives can connect to a FW400 port without any trouble at all. And if you've got a FW800-capable machine, you will notice the benefits over FW400.

At any rate, the OWC enclosure also has USB 2.0 ports on it, so you'll never be in a situation where you won't be able to hook it up at all in the foreseeable future.

This is absolutely correct. What Apple should have done and actually still could do is drop the FW400 ports on all Macs and instead use only FW800 ports. FW800 is downward compatible. A simple $3 dongle would allow people to use all FW400 peripherals. On the other hand such a move would immediately create a large installed user base. You would see a surge in available FW800 peripherals.

The way they're handling it right now they might as well can FW altogether and go eSATA.

eSATA would be fantastic (fast and cheap), but I think Apple will wait until SATA-IO adds power to the standard.

Obviously. FW's key advantages are cable length and bus power. If the latter eventually gets taken care of that's one more reason to switch. It's a pity we're till waiting for that.

You wouldn't even need a dongle - all that would have happened would have been that when you'd go out to buy a FW cable, you'd get one with a FW800 connector on one end and a FW400 connector on the other instead of one with FW400 on both ends. Apple could have even supplied a cable with the first few generations of FW800-only machines, the same way they supplied a 6-pin to 4-pin connector with the first few generations of FireWire-enabled Macs so users would get used to the connector not being the same as the one on their video camera.

Oh well, FW is dead. Bring on eSATA.
Well, the other advantage is daisy-chaining, which to be honest is really helpful, although I'm not sure it will help FireWire much against eSATA's blazing speeds (now, if FW800 were commonplace, it might have more of a chance since the difference from eSATA would be smaller).

Sure it is but you can get a decent eSATA enclosure which will include a port multiplier on the backplane so you can connect up to 15 devices to one SATA bus. Of course all devices have to share the 3Gbps bandwidth, but it is fully transparent to the drives.

i have two posts here (somewhere) that are related. I just got a 2.5 esata/usb/fw400 enclosure (very nice) but I guess I need to get a pci card to hook up the esata connection. The tech at the apple shop (Saim - Paragon mall) told me that esata won't boot, so I did not get the PCI card just yet. Is this true? he also told me that usb won't boot but it does, so I am not sure what is true. I need a solution for many macs in our studio, and I am here shopping, so not sure what enclosures to get. it seems the choices here in BKK are this:
1. estata 2/usb/firewire400
2. usb/firewire800
So what to do? We have imacs, and for those it seems esata2 is out of the question, yes? So for a solution for both imacs and mbps, it seems that option 2 is the fastest yes?

Thanks for ur help!
FD

For iMacs and MBPs you definitely need option 2. You can get eSATA on the MBP (E/34 card), but not on the iMac. In principle there is a solution to get eSATA on the iMac but it involves attaching an adapter to FW400. That will bottleneck you to FW400 speeds. FW800 will offer superior performance.

And yes, you can boot both your MBP and your iMac off a USB HDD.

Thanks Simon. I think Option 2 would be best but now the problem is that firewire800 is almost impossible to find here in BKK. I guess asia just isn't up to speed, or they are bypassing fw800 altogether or just using usb. The only cases I can find that have fw800 are over 100$. They are nice however, they use the same chipset as Lacie enclosures so the salesperson says. The 30$ cases are all usb and some are fw400, but really really cheesy...chinese aluminum case/awful power supplies (i know from experience)/and no fan. oh well, I guess I have to bite the bullet!
FD

PS. Is the e/34 card really worth it? that runs about 75$ here...but it makes video work faster on a 5400 2.5 drive, then perhaps I will spring for the card, as my external case supports it...also, will it boot from the e/34 card? thx again.

But eSATA is really only for hard drives, and even if you are satisfied with USB for most everything else, I won't take a digital camcorder seriously if it doesn't have Firewire.

True, but USB technology keeps advancing as well, with USB 3.0 on the horizon. I suspect that as soon as USB becomes "good enough" for camcorders, you'll stop seeing FireWire being used there anymore either.

I thought firewire was dead the day after Apple started producing USB-only iPods?

That was more of a symptom than a cause.

"In principle there is a solution to get