[fdmendez]

Where in the world can I find a firewire enclosure for a SATA hard drive!?

It seems like every website I go to (MWAVE, NEWEGG, TIGERDIRECT, COMPUSA, BEST BUY, and CIRCUIT CITY) carry firewire enclosures only for IDE/ATA drives and only USB enclosures for SATA drives.

I know I am a nerd among nerds, so please, someone point me in the right direction.

Thanks.

[CharlesS]

Do you already have the SATA hard drive? If not, I'd just go with the ATA enclosure and put an ATA drive in it. Since ATA/133 is already faster than FireWire (even FW 800), you won't see any speed improvements from making the internal drive SATA.

[natural1]

...this

[macintologist]

Originally Posted by natural1

...this

Only for $109

[vmarks]

Yeah, but it's really pretty future proof. it works with USB2, firewire 400 and 800, and eSata which is faster than the others anyway.

I think the aluminum construction, all cables included and the wealth of ports make it a winner, even at that price.

[Oneota]

Only for $109

Well, so far, it's one of the only games in town. I've got two drives in my G5 right now: the stock 80 and an extra 200, both of which are nearly full. I've got a 320 on the way and I'm just going to clone the 200 to the 320, and clone the 80 to the 200, and swap 'em out. That'll leave me with a perfectly good 80 GB drive. It might be worth $100 to get more use out of it.

[Peter]

I got a USB2 SATA external hard disk enclosure for about $40, surely firewire isn't worth $70

[starman]

I got one from CompUSA for $50-ish. It wasn't very reliable, but it did the job. The connection was always flaky.

Maybe buy one with an enclosure already and sell the other on eBay?

[ghporter]

I'll bet that in normal operation NONE OF US will be able to detect a difference in performance between USB 2.0 and firewire without benchmarking software. Firewire's biggest claim to better performance is that it has better sustained throughput, but that really only becomes evident when moving gargantuan files, while in most situations we'll all be moving relatively small files that USB's burst mode makes short work of.

YYMV, but for the most part you won't be noticably slowed down by choosing a USB enclosure.

OK, now the firewire evangelists can start the pyre to throw me into... I'm ready.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by ghporter

YYMV, but for the most part you won't be noticably slowed down by choosing a USB enclosure.

Booting from USB is REALLY slo. Takes forever. Literally.

-t

[ghporter]

I hadn't ever tried booting from one on any platform; I have just used external drives for extra storage. I don't know why it would take extra time to boot from USB...

[wataru]

Originally Posted by what_the_heck

Takes forever. Literally.

Uh, no.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by ghporter

I don't know why it would take extra time to boot from USB...

Because, AFAIK, you can't boot from external USB HDs on a Mac AT ALL

-t

[fdmendez]

Well, the reason why I have this drive is because I came upon a brand new Western Digital 250GB SATAII hard drive for twenty bucks via an employee discount and those good ol' rebates.

Now I have this hard drive and I'm a film student and (since we don't have any network attached storage assigned to students and it wouldn't be practical to have everyone save their projects onto the Mac workstations which don't have a whole lot of hard drive space anyways) i'd like to use this drive as my external hard drive (which we all must get as film students eventually in order to work on projects and have them saved).

I'd normally be fine with USB, but firewire is pretty much required for video work since, as stated earlier, it moves large files much more consistently.

That enclosure for 109 bucks is really cool and it'd be perfect if it wasn't for the $109 price tage. Any other suggestions? If worse comes to worse I'll sell it and just buy a Lacie or Seagate external.

[Gossamer]

Be careful about the enclosure you buy too. We bought an external SATA here at work, and it turns out there's a ~100GB or so limit on SATA drives over firewire, meaning I couldn't hook up the 160GB drive out of my G5 to my G4 tower, unless i wanted to use USB 1.1

[vmarks]

Originally Posted by what_the_heck

Because, AFAIK, you can't boot from external USB HDs on a Mac AT ALL

-t

Intel Macs will boot off USB I believe.

And, firewire is used less commonly, the 924 chipset is a newer one, and it's just plain more expensive then USB2 chipsets.

[hookem2oo7]

my ibook g4 boots off of usb harddrives...even though you have to change boot-device in OF, it still boots

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by vmarks

Intel Macs will boot off USB I believe.

I thought I heard otherwise.

Anyone tried it ?

-t