Honestly any enclosure is usually fine. I have one enclosure and one dock, both Vantec, I consider them a cheap brand but I've run the former at work every day, 8 hours a day, for over 2 years now. They're such simple devices, it's pretty hard for a manufacturer to screw them up.

As for drives, people generally use the 10K RPM ones (Velociraptors) as the system/swap/boot drives. If you're just using it to store data or backups then those are likely a waste of money and you should stick with a conventional 7200. Go for a Seagate or Western Digital. You can always find someone who hates one brand or the other because they had a bad experience, but those two manufacturers are the most reliable and they're pretty well on par with each other.

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quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut Honestly any enclosure is usually fine.

Worse advice of the month! no offense

Having said that ...

The best built and most reliable 2.5" enclosures come from Macally because it uses Oxford chips not generic or the Initio chips which have major problems.

bad enclosure= bad things to come

go Macally!

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quote:

Originally posted by Alekos The best built and most reliable 2.5" enclosures come from Macally because it uses Oxford chips not generic or the Initio chips which have major problems.

I guess I can only speak from experience. What problems have you seen with other enclosures or the chips they use?

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My party schedule:
2009-02-21 - DJ Attention @ I'm So Popular
2009-06-18 - DJ Annoying @ People Need To Know Where I'll Be
2012-11-32 - DJ Insufferable ɸ Or At Least the Stalkers I Complain About
2048-06-66 - Spastic & Whocares ¶ Although I'm Actually Flattered
9999-45-81 - Tweaker Gimp ☼ I Probably Won't Even Go To This But I Have To Make Sure I Fill Up All The Available Space Here

yeah firewire bridges going out is a recurring theme at the studio i work at.

I myself use a glyph 050q. not the cheapest drives but great warranty and support. last week my firewire bridge went out and i overnighted it to glyph they worked on it and overnighted it back to me for free.


this sounds like a bad infomercial lol

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut I guess I can only speak from experience. What problems have you seen with other enclosures or the chips they use?

I've lost valuable of data due to the chip burning out and killing the HD. I would re-back-up all of my files if I was using a cheap enclosure.

Cheers

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agh im struggling.

I have 300gb maxtor external disk which i tried to change from NTFS to FAT32 without deleting the files using diskutility in Mac OSX. Well the files are away. What to do? I didnt format it i selected the "no erase" option which only changes the file system from NTFS to FAT32 but afterwards i red that i needed to use third party software to make my files undeleted or viewable somehow.

Thanks people for all the input!!!

The only strange thing is, I can't seem to find any drive enclosures (from decent brands) under about $80. By the time I add a cheap major brand internal drive, I'm looking at about $150.

Macmall are currently doing the LaCie 250gb rugged drives (the orange and silver ones) for $90!!! It's got USB2, fw400 and fw800 on board.

I know I'd save money in the long run because I could swap out the internal drives but those rugged ones are tough as nails and I've never seen one malfunction.

They're ven doing the 500gb one for $150.

I'm really having trouble talking myself out of this one......

quote:

Originally posted by palm agh im struggling. I have 300gb maxtor external disk which i tried to change from NTFS to FAT32 without deleting the files using diskutility in Mac OSX. Well the files are away. What to do? I didnt format it i selected the "no erase" option which only changes the file system from NTFS to FAT32 but afterwards i red that i needed to use third party software to make my files undeleted or viewable somehow.

Plam - did you try to convert a drive from NTFS to fat without backing up first?

You should be able to convert without losing data.

I know partition magic can do this function so maybe it coupld help you see your data too?

Also on a pc you do this to convert: http://www.ntfs.com/quest3.htm

It might be an idea to plug the drive in to a pc and see if the files are visible as xp has dual ntfs and fat32 support.

nah their not visible on XP either, it would be interesting to know if that dos-command stated on ntfs.com would work the other way too, from NTFS to FAT32 cause this was what i was trying to do. As im running bootcamp I need atleast one disk that both XP and OSX can both read and write.

on ubuntu forums they recomended a prog called disktest, avaliable for windows and linux to undelete lost partitions. i didnt understand it, it was dos-based or something and not very intuitive so I gave up.

Dont worry i always have backup, i just thought id save some time. ill just copy them over one more time 150GB takes time!

now im on the looki for a multi-HD SATA bay to combine all my old HDs and connect to the mac, like 3 SATA disks. Any recomandations?

quote:

Originally posted by palm nah their not visible on XP either, it would be interesting to know if that dos-command stated on ntfs.com would work the other way too, from NTFS to FAT32 cause this was what i was trying to do. As im running bootcamp I need atleast one disk that both XP and OSX can both read and write. on ubuntu forums they recomended a prog called disktest, avaliable for windows and linux to undelete lost partitions. i didnt understand it, it was dos-based or something and not very intuitive so I gave up. Dont worry i always have backup, i just thought id save some time. ill just copy them over one more time 150GB takes time! now im on the looki for a multi-HD SATA bay to combine all my old HDs and connect to the mac, like 3 SATA disks. Any recomandations?

Nah, AFAIK, that dos command apparently only really works one way. TBH, I would just format that puppy and transfer the files - it will probably take less time than figuring it out with the recovery software.

I don't have any recommendations myself but I know Laurent has a serious amount of driveage and knows a fair bit about the multi bay options.

Laurent?.........

quote:

Originally posted by DJ RANN Nah, AFAIK, that dos command apparently only really works one way. TBH, I would just format that puppy and transfer the files - it will probably take less time than figuring it out with the recovery software. I don't have any recommendations myself but I know Laurent has a serious amount of driveage and knows a fair bit about the multi bay options. Laurent?.........

what happened to palm sucks... I feel for you mate. I don't know anything about fs conversion from NTFS to FAT32 myself as I never use it. I stay away from the pc standards as they tend to be slower on Mac OS X. All I can say is that you always need a backup when doing this kind of stuff. Apparently you had one!! Good for you.

A multi SATA bay will cost you a lot of money for just a bunch of old drives. 3 drives means a 4-bay enclosure, and that will cost you 300$ if not more.

If you just want to combine those drives so that they mount as one, get some external dock-style enclosures (you just put your drive in those as a floppy!) in USB2 with a dedicated hub only for them, then you go to disk utility and do a software RAID involving your drives. It's not as fast as a hardware RAID system, but the good thing about it is that you can combine those drives in RAID0 or in RAID1 (which is the safest, RAID1 takes two drives and writes the data twice on the two drives, so if a drive dies, the other one takes over!)

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thanks lolo, any links for those dock things? can i have more than one disk in them? want to save both powercables and usb cables, kinda enough cables here already hehe.

edit: btw it would also need a vent i think to cool of the drives but also i would like it not to make too much noise lol. sounds expensive anyway imo.

Last edited by djpalm on Apr-23-2009 at 13:29

bump.

now i have 4 SATA disks, 2*500GB and 2*1TB lol not used for anything. I want to put them in a somekinda Dock with power and fan and hopefully both usb/firewire or nettwork. Wouldnt mind if it had raid-controller too so that two and two disk where the same. Any recomandations? Raids not important though it could be enough just with power and usb. less is more.