[electroJerm]

I'm about to trade my Quicksilver PowerMac for a new PowerBook. A year ago I installed a Western Digital 120 gig 7200 RPM HD inside.

Since I'll need to keep using this drive, can I just take it out, put it in a firewire enclosure, and keep using it without any problems? Will the performance of the drive be signifanctly different than the performance it gets internally? Specifically, what kind of enclosure do I need for this drive? 3.5 inch? Do regular HD's fit in cases smaller than that?

And, most importantly, what are recomendations of inexpensive, slim, and portable firewire enclosures for internal drives? Please link to your favorites or good deals you're aware of.

Thanks

[Earth Mk. II]

it couldn't hurt to browse over at newegg.com. They usually have pretty good deals and plenty of info and pictures of their products.

You defiantly won't get the same performance on the drive as you did internally, but it should still be very usable for most activities. Just be aware that FW maxes out at 400 Mbps, or roughly 50 MB/s - and that's under perfect conditions. Actual performance will be a little lower. (By comparison, on an ATA-66 bus - like inside your PowerMac - you have a max theoretical speed of 66 MB/s, much higher than the theoretical limit of FW-400)

You should be able to just keep on using it after transferring it to an external case too - but I'd still recommend backing any important data up... just in case.

For a case.. you want something that can fit a 3.5 inch drive. Smaller won't fit your typical desktop system's hard drive. Look for the Oxford-911 chipset too, that's generally considered the best out there.

This is one I picked up over the summer. Haven't had any problems with it, and it matches my AlBook's case nicely.

[zigzag]

You need a 3.5" or bigger enclosure. It's been quite a while since I saw a non-Oxford-chip enclosure, but definitely make sure your enclosure uses one. If your PBook has FW 800, you might want to consider a FW 800 enclosure.

These guys sell pretty cheap enclosures:

http://www.coolerexpress.com/exen.html

I've bought a couple of IceCube-style enclosures from these guys and am happy:

http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Pa...le=&Template=1

[dgbatchelor]

Definitely consider the FW 800 case if the new laptop will support it. The speed improvement is very noticable... and this will free up your slower FW 400 ports for other items (like FW scanner, etc.)

Note: FW 800 is a different Oxford chip set... The 922 instead of the 911

http://www.apple.com/firewire/

http://www.wiebetech.com/products/fire800.html

[electroJerm]

So I looked into this a bit further and have a new question... If Firewire maxes out at 400 Mbs, what about USB 2.0 which maxes out at 480 Mbs? If its theoretically faster, does that mean its faster in actuality? What are your experiences with this?

I found a nice USB 2.0 enclosure on newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProduc...1&searchdepa=0

Anyone used a macally enclosure before and have any comments? Is USB 2.0 good enough or should I pay a bit more and get something with FIrewire also?

[dgbatchelor]

Don't know if you'll feel any speed difference between FW 400 and USB 2.0... There is a definite speed difference between FW 400 and USB 1.0... I also notice the difference between FW 400 and FW 800.

If it was me, I'd add the extra interfaces to give me flexibility down the road... One thing I think we all realize is that these interfaces (and the availability on various computers) is always changing.

I recall one situation where the FW 400 interface failed on the drive... Initially thought that the drive was corrupted -- fortunately, I had USB 1.0 on the drive, too... That let me quickly debug the situation (and save all my data).

YMMV.