Portability of Fire Wire enclosures

[galveston]

I am going to be purchasing a powerbook in the next few weeks and will be selling my 466 G4 desktop once I do. Before it goes though, i plan on pulling the 80 gig drive that i installed as a second drive and using it as a firewire drive with the PB with the help of a FW enclosure. I've never used one of these cases before and was wondering how mobile I can expect to be with it. Is it equal to buying an external harddrive? Or is it better off left at home and used when the computer serves as my desktop's replacement?

Thanks!

-AP

 

[bousozoku]

I have an 3.5 inch 80 GB 5400 rpm FireWire drive from Maxtor. To be blunt, it's heavy. I take it to school with me, along with the power supply and I generally have to remove a couple of things from the backup. In any case, it's better than relying on the Zip disks everyone else is using, which fail so quickly.

 

[Balin64]

Re: Portability of Fire Wire enclosures

Originally posted by galveston
I am going to be purchasing a powerbook in the next few weeks and will be selling my 466 G4 desktop once I do. Before it goes though, i plan on pulling the 80 gig drive that i installed as a second drive and using it as a firewire drive with the PB with the help of a FW enclosure. I've never used one of these cases before and was wondering how mobile I can expect to be with it. Is it equal to buying an external harddrive? Or is it better off left at home and used when the computer serves as my desktop's replacement?

Thanks!

-AP

I did the same thing with my G4 and now have a FW enclosure for a 7200rpm 80GB Western Digital. It serves as a video drive for both my 17" iMac and my new 12" Powerbook. I chose a very light but hardy enclosure, so carrying it around is not too bad considering I have 140GB of space combined. What I did to prevent movement of the drive is this: I installed the drive towards the back of the enclosure, making sure that the connectors were snug against the back of teh enclosure but not crammed too tight so that it would cause problems. I also did not use teh screws that came with the enclosure. I used the highest gauge screws teh enclosure would take, and actually used a power drill in low torque to tighten them. Trust me, that drive is going nowhere. What's cool about the case I got is that it can sit in teh standars position or upright. I think it's from ADS technologies and it was only 60 bucks. My only beef is that the sliding cover can sometimes come off with little pressure, but I fixed that by strapping black stage gaffer's tape to the seam. NJo more sliding cover problems.

 

[Balin64]

One More Thing

Make sure that the enclosure has the Oxford 911 Chip Set.

 

[DVvideo Guy]

Sorry about the self promotion, but I think this might be helpful. Check out our site: http://www.dvvideo.com/shop

We have a bunch of great FireWire Enclosures using OXford 911 chipsets. We also have a new enclosure called the black box which has 3 firewire 800 ports/a USB 2 port and a cable that goes from firewire 800 to firewire 400.

Hope this helps, James

 

[LethalWolfe]

Even the smallest enclosure is going to be a bit cumbersome to carry around a lot. If you have the money I'd suggest getting a firelite drive. They use 4200RPM HDDs and are pretty solidly built. They are bus powered (so all you need is a FW cable and yer set) and they are smaller than a 3"x5" index card. They even have 2 fw ports on them. We've basically replaced all of our zip/jaz stuff at my work w/these drives.


Lethal

 

[Abraxsis]

Personally I find someone with an old laptop with 2-3GB hard drive in it that theyre throwing out or whatever, and pick up a USB 2.0 Laptop drive enclosure on eBay (usually less than 30.00 shipped). Throw the laptop drive in the enclosure and BAM!* you got a bus powered 2-3GB drive that weighs next to nothing. Maybe if youre lucky youll find a thrown out 6GB laptop, then youd be in business. Just remember to keep in mind the drive's height. Some 2.5" enclosures are for 9mm drives, while others will accept all drives including the 12.7mm drives.

*Bam! is a registered trademark of Emeril Lagasse.