[Chewn]

Hey , I was wondering it you guys could tell me a little bit about external firewire hard drives?, I know you can buy them but you can also buy and enclosure and put them in right, so if i bought an enclosure do what kind of hard drive will it use, IDE hard drives or a special kind?, um yeah i think thats pretyt much all i need to know. for now, lol, thanks so much guys, ....lata

[mlai]

If you decide to buy a standalone enclosure, all you need is a standard IDE HDD.

Just don't get a Serial ATA or SCSI drive (unless you have a unique enclosure that supports those interface types).

[zigzag]

Buy a FW enclosure from a place like this:

www.macsales.com

www.wiebetech.com

They also sell drives pre-installed but you can often find drives cheaper if you shop around.

If you just get an enclosure, buy any compatible IDE drive, install it in the enclosure, plug it into your Mac, open Disk Utility, and format it for HFS+.

Here are two good places to buy bare IDE drives:

www.googlegear.com

www.newegg.com

Also check www.dealmac.com for special deals. I just bought a 160 GB drive at Best Buy for $100 after rebates.

[Stogieman]

Just remember that not all firewire enclosures will work with hard drives that are greater than 128 GBs in capacity. Make sure you buy an enclosure that supports large capacity drives.

You may want to check out Firewire Depot. All of the their enclosures will work with drives greater than 128 GBs. Their prices are a little high but they have buy far the best looking firewire enclosures.

I purchased the 3.5" Speedzter3 FW/USB enclosure from there and I'm impressed. It's one of the smallest/fanless enclosures out there for a 3.5" drive.

[Sam Venning]

I think I have a problem with three IceCube800 cases I purchased recently. I wonder if there is a firmware update that will fix the problem. I explain the problem in detail below.

I decided to get two Hitachi 180GB 8MB Deskstar GXP drives for work and one for my own personal use. I got the Hitachi 180GB Deskstar GXP because it was the one recommended by www.barefeats.com (excellent site!). The benchmark tests look very good for this drive (see link below). The benchmak tests also look good when this drive is put in a nice new IceCube800 Firewire 800 enclosure (see link below).

There seems to be a problem with the IceCube800 enclosure. I've used the drives on several PowerMac G4 computers using both the Firewire400 and Firewire800 connections. Two of the drives have experienced corrupt directories - serious corruptions that Diskwarrior 3 can't repair. I can retrieve some of the data but when I try to retrieve one folder the drive light blinks on and off (slowly) and my Mac (Mac OS 10.2.6) becomes unresponsive.

I reformatted the hard disk drives (zero all data) in a fresh attempt to start with a "clean" drive... but the problem has returned - twice on one drive. I don't entirely trust the other drives now.

I'm not sure if the corruption is caused by the Mac OS (Mac OS 10.2.6), the Firewire 800 bridge or the hard drives. I don't know whether to try them on the IDE bus or wait for an OS upgrade (maybe Mac OS 10.2.6 isn't so good with large drives... maybe the 8MB hard drive cache isn't getting flushed/written to the disk). I suspect the problem with the IceCube800 enclosure/bridge-board. I will try the drives on internal IDE busses for a few days to see if the problem "goes away".

I hope FWDepot might have an update to "fix" the IceCube800 chipset/bridge-board.

http://www.barefeats.com/#quick - Rob recommends Hitachi drive.
http://www.barefeats.com/fire37.html - Rob's review of the Firewire 800 enclosures.
http://www.barefeats.com/hard26.html - Rob's review of the Hitachi drive.
http://fwdepot.com/thestore/product...products_id/385 - IceCube800 enclosure details.