[Orthodoc]

Can anybody recommend a good firewire hard drive for my tibook? I need 40 to 60 GB and prefer 7200 rpm. Thanks.

[israces]

Make your own. Get a Pyro 1394 case with the Oxford 911 bridge. A WD Caviar drive with the 8MB buffer. Take 15 minutes to attach four plugs and 10 screws and you're up and running.

[Orthodoc]

How much do the parts cost?

[climber]

A hundred bucks for the case plus the HD. But you can use a old or even used hd.

More if the case is smaller and uses notebook drives and a powered bus.

[cgg1972]

I have 2 Maxtor external firewire drives (the 80GB and the 160GB models) - they are linked together and run very well - no problems to date.

[G4ME]

thats a special FW case thogu right? a dual bay

[Todd Corzett]

I have a 4-bay case with two bridgeboards, currently running a 75GB 7200RPM IBM drive, DVD drive, and Zip .... but when money becomes more available I'm going to upgrade it to 4x120GB 7200RPM IBM drives! So far the case and bridgeboards work great!

If you have old IDE drives laying around (like I did with my 75GB) then build your own case, or buy an empty one. If you don't have the drive, or the time to spend (5min!?!) building one buy a pre-built one.

-Todd...

Edit: Yes you need a "special" case, but any old SCSI case will work great... just pop out the old cards and put in some firewire bridgeboards and your ready to go. You can proably find some old SCSI cases people are getting rid of (that's what I did) then order bridgeboards from fwdepot.com (or anywhere else) and for $80 you got a new (multi-bay) case! -- Most (all that I've seen) bridgeboards have a single IDE channel which can be used by two drives (master/slave) so if building a case it's a waste not to use a multi-bay case.

[klinux]

I need one that works with PC too. I want to take a 80GB one and use that as a backup drive (using restrospect) for both PC and Mac. I assume it is easier if I format it NTFS? Or two distinct partitions one for PC and one for Mac?

[scottiB]

Todd--you rock.

My office has an old 4-bay SCSI chassis collecting dust. I never would've thought to reuse it for FW drives and accesories. Sounds like an autumnal project.

Thanks for the idea.

[Todd Corzett]

It's official --- I ROCK!

Yeah, there are quite a few of those old multi-bay SCSI cases sitting around with 2GB drives in them. Most people just toss them - I found mine in a trash can! (don't ask what I was doing going through the trash can ).

One of these days when I get the 4x120GB (what will I ever use half a terabite for ) I'll be very happy. I've took a page from a PC mod book (again, don't ask ) and have a thermal monitoring system... ok, I was bored again! I have a 7 channel thermal probe/fan controler hooked up to two 80mm exaust fans and three 3x 40x40x25mm (so 9 40x40x25mm fans) to bring in cool air. What's really nice is that the fans don't come on until the internal temperature of the case rises, and one/more of the fans are turned on depending on where the temperature is higher Yes, I was really bored... but now I can shove it in the faces of my PC friends - My HD case has 12 fans... how many does yours have!?! - lol

Anyone have an 8 bay case so I can setup a terabite storage device!?!

-Todd...