[Eug Wanker]

It seems that most of the Firewire drives out there are IDE. That means that they are limited to 400 or 500 GB, but many enclosures won't even handle a 400 GB drive. I want bigger. I already have a 400 GB Firewire 400 drive.

Looking at the SATA Firewire 800 drives, many are dual drives or IDE drives, but ones that do Firewire 800 --> SATA are extremely expensive. Am I just looking in the wrong spot?

I want to eventually get a 500-750 GB Firewire 800 drive, for my 24" iMac.

[mduell]

FW800 enclosures are more expensive than any other (consumer level) external bus enclosure due to higher component prices and lower volume. SATA enclosures are more expensive than ATA enclosures (likely for the same reason). Put the two together and you're looking at a very low volume market with high costs.

Why not just buy a FW800/ATA enclosure? I don't see them stopping ATA drive production anytime soon. The only thing you can get in SATA that you can't get in ATA is 10k RPM, but you're not interested in that.

[iMacfan]

I'd also love it if anyone did know anything about this.

I'm in the position of already having a Seagate 7200.8 300Gb SATA drive that I want to use with a 24" iMac - but the enclosures seem to cost as much as the drive did!

David