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2.5" SATA external Enclosure

purelithium

purelithium

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 28, 2006
355
0
Kingston, Canada
Does anyone have a line on one of these?

I pulled the 60gb drive out of my MacBook and want to use it as external storage, but can't find a decent external case for it.

USB/Firewire doesn't matter, unless someone can pursuade me that one is better than the other.

It should be stylish to match my pretty MacBook. But not an absolute requirement.
 
purelithium said:
Does anyone have a line on one of these?

I pulled the 60gb drive out of my MacBook and want to use it as external storage, but can't find a decent external case for it.

USB/Firewire doesn't matter, unless someone can pursuade me that one is better than the other.
Click to expand...

Firewire is better since it has significantly better real world performance than USB 2. Additionally, a firewire connection to a notebook drive in an external enclosure will power the drive from the firewire bus removing the need for a separate power supply. (Some earlier Mac laptops and PCs would not provide enough power over the firewire bus to power a drive, but current Mac laptops do provide enough power.)

SATA notebook drives are only fairly new so there are not many 2.5" enclosures on the market yet. Cooldrives has one: http://www.cooldrives.com/2sahddencosa.html and the same enclosure is being sold by transintl http://www.transintl.com/store/category.cfm?Category=2643

Give it a another month and you should see more enclosures. A google search will turn up a couple of usb only enclosures but I haven't been keeping track of the USB only ones.

Note that you need to use two USB ports to bus power a notebook drive. On a MacBook that means you cannot use a USB mouse unless you carry a powered USB hub... defeating the purpose of a bus powered external drive.
 
I have this one. It comes with a black leather case that I keep mine in. Mine is firewire and USB2. It is solid aluminum in contrast to the cheap plastic cases you see everywhere else. I bought it from Newegg.
 
I have a friend that got one from ebay for $20. It has an aluminum enclosure and runs off of and is powered by USB2. Apparently, you can find great deals on enclosures there. If you're not comfortable with ebay I'd buy off of NewEgg as someone else has suggested.

You only need firewire if you are doing a good deal of video creation. Otherwise, you'll never notice a difference.
 
topgunn said:
I have this one. It comes with a black leather case that I keep mine in. Mine is firewire and USB2. It is solid aluminum in contrast to the cheap plastic cases you see everywhere else. I bought it from Newegg.
Click to expand...

The only problem is that that enclosure takes an IDE drive. The OP was asking about SATA enclosures since the MacBooks use SATA drives.
 
QuarterSwede said:
You only need firewire if you are doing a good deal of video creation. Otherwise, you'll never notice a difference.
Click to expand...
Or if you want to boot a pre-intel Mac. Or if you want double the real-world transfer speed of USB2 (yes I benchmarked it myself)
As noted, the $20 case you got from eBay is IDE, not SATA.
 
mrichmon said:
Note that you need to use two USB ports to bus power a notebook drive. On a MacBook that means you cannot use a USB mouse unless you carry a powered USB hub... defeating the purpose of a bus powered external drive.
Click to expand...

That's not always true. That's only the case if you have an older laptop that cannot supply enough current through the USB port. Most newer laptops supply enough current to power a 2.5" external drive. I've been doing it for about a year with my Thinkpad. I sold the other 2.5" external because I thought 120gb was enough for me(turns out I was wrong!). My Vantec 2.5" IDE enclosure was great, it had a 2-port cable, but I never needed to plug in the 2nd one.

Thanks to everyone for the tips. I'll keep my eyes open!
 
sorry to be bringing this thread back from the dead, but I'm looking for an enclosure too. Is there a reason that all of the SATA enclosures are ridiculously more expensive as well as insanely larger physically than many of the IDE enclosures?

I mean, compare the two: SATA vs IDE.

It's ridiculous.... I have the old drive from my computer lying around, and I'd really like to use use it in an external enclosure, but it's hard to justify paying 5+ times as much for a SATA enclosure as it's IDE counterpart which is itself smaller and easier to carry around.
 
comictimes said:
It's ridiculous.... I have the old drive from my computer lying around, and I'd really like to use use it in an external enclosure, but it's hard to justify paying 5+ times as much for a SATA enclosure as it's IDE counterpart which is itself smaller and easier to carry around.
Click to expand...

You are comparing enclosures with very different features. The IDE/USB enclosure you cite uses a cheap and at times unstable chipset to support USB only. The SATA enclosure you cite uses a known stable and fast chipset (Oxford 924) and supports both USB and Firewire.
 
mrichmon said:
You are comparing enclosures with very different features. The IDE/USB enclosure you cite uses a cheap and at times unstable chipset to support USB only. The SATA enclosure you cite uses a known stable and fast chipset (Oxford 924) and supports both USB and Firewire.
Click to expand...
well even so. if you take a peak at even the good IDE enclosures, they'll only run you around $30.

SATA is more expensive because it's faster and the technology is newer, I'd assume.
 
The only reliable chips that work with MacBooks are the Oxford chips stay away from the NEC & Initio chips they have been known to fail alot. Most of the cheap drives use Initio or NEC. Remember you get what you pay for.

I am an Apple Consultant and Apple Technician in south Florida and the only drive enclosures that I recommend and buy for my clients are from http://Wiebetech.com and Other World Computing http://www.macsales.com/. The quality of both companies products and their customer service is the best. Their shipping and handling charges are very reasonable, 2nd day for $7.95. I prefer Wiebetech's product line of them all, Wiebetech is the main supplier of drives to the US Dept of Defence and the Justice Dept. They make some very interesting forensic products and multidrive enclosures
 
CanadaRAM said:
Or if you want to boot a pre-intel Mac. Or if you want double the real-world transfer speed of USB2 (yes I benchmarked it myself)
As noted, the $20 case you got from eBay is IDE, not SATA.
Click to expand...

Hang on, so Intel macs can boot from USB? I've spent the last several hours trying to find a good but affordable firewire enclosure just so I'd be able to boot to it. I knew previously you could only boot to firewire. Did this change with the switch to Intel? If so, I guess I missed the memo.
 
Yes, they can boot into USB.

But if you want a drive to boot to, you'd still be better to go for a Firewire enclosure. Believe me as someone who has booted from both USB and Firewire, you'll notice the difference when doing anything disk related - it's like going back to a 4200 rpm HDD after using a 7200 rpm HDD.

For backups, USB2 drives are good enough.
 
I'm wondering if anyone has any more suggestions on 2.5" SATA enclosures? I'm needing to upgrade the HDD in my Macbook, and I want to use the factory HDD for other storage.

Thanks for any info.
 
purelithium said:
That's not always true. That's only the case if you have an older laptop that cannot supply enough current through the USB port. Most newer laptops supply enough current to power a 2.5" external drive. I've been doing it for about a year with my Thinkpad. I sold the other 2.5" external because I thought 120gb was enough for me(turns out I was wrong!). My Vantec 2.5" IDE enclosure was great, it had a 2-port cable, but I never needed to plug in the 2nd one.

Thanks to everyone for the tips. I'll keep my eyes open!
Click to expand...

I have a MacBook Core2Duo and my external 2.5" drive (with a 250GB SATA internal) HAS to have both USB cables in (data & power) or it will NOT work. It is still very worth it as we are talking about an extremely small drive.

There are many cheap SATA enclosures now. I have a Transcend which I bought from ecost.com for about $16.
 
purelithium said:
That's not always true. That's only the case if you have an older laptop that cannot supply enough current through the USB port. Most newer laptops supply enough current to power a 2.5" external drive. I've been doing it for about a year with my Thinkpad. I sold the other 2.5" external because I thought 120gb was enough for me(turns out I was wrong!). My Vantec 2.5" IDE enclosure was great, it had a 2-port cable, but I never needed to plug in the 2nd one.

Thanks to everyone for the tips. I'll keep my eyes open!
Click to expand...

I have a MacBook Core2Duo and my external 2.5" drive (with a 250GB SATA internal) HAS to have both USB cables in (data & power) or it will NOT work. It is still very worth it as we are talking about an extremely small drive.

There are many cheap SATA enclosures now. I have a Transcend which I bought from ecost.com for about $16.
 
reubs said:
Thanks for that, but some folks need some form of protection for the HDD itself, I'm sure. I don't want random HDDs floating around anymore than they have to.
Click to expand...

Yeah, of course; Having upgraded from machine to machine, drive to drive for the last, say, 10 years I have about 20 bare drives laying around, not counting the 6 or so currently in enclosures. I would only suggest this "bare drive cable" for someone who is constantly being asked to restore data from a drive or is doing routine data saving.
 
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