Enclosure Recommendation

[FlaminMoe]

After six sodding weeks spent trying to get hold of the 500GB Lacie Mac Mini drive, I've decided to give up.

I've also given up waiting for a firmware flash that would allow my to play my Region-1 DVDs on my Matshita-UJ846 drive.

Instead, I'm going to get an internal hard drive (haven't decided which on yet - suggestions appreciated!) and a Pioneer DVR-110D DVD.

I'm looking for any recommendations for an enclosure that will hold 3 to 5 disks, including the DVD drive (probably 5.25", front loading) and the hard drive (probably 3.25"), has decent cooling and is super quiet. Since it'll be sitting in my living room, it would also be nice if it looked good, and matched aesthetically with the Mac Mini.

Any suggestions?

[purelithium]

Wow, that's quite the tall order. I've never heard of a pretty enclosure that does all that! you'd probably be best to get a cheap PC, maybe a Pentium 3 and a nice case to go with it.

[OldCorpse]

Man, that's a hard one... you're asking for a lot in one enclosure. Wrt. HDD, I'd recommend Seagate drives, great 5 year warranty, very good quality. I've bought 5 so far, the largest 500GB, and haven't had a lick of trouble, and by general acclaim, Seagate is the leader in HDD. Western Digital are all right, some don't like 'em, but generally a decent rep. Maxtor (recently bought by Seagate) are very iffy, many people report trouble. Hitachis (and whatever the 'star' drives that they also brand when they bought IBM's old HDD division) are generally slow (a guy here on MR did a series ot tests where the 7200RPM Hitachis were actually slower than 5400RPM Seagates!). Fujitsu are failure prone (at least the 2.5 notebook HDD). Of course, any hard drive can fail, so it's always a numbers game. Seagates are also very quiet by and large, which is one of your requirements (WD drives by contrast are like helicopters). All IMHO, YMMV. Sorry I couldn't help with the enclosure!