Best Bang For Your Buck FW800?? and PATA hard drive woes

[kryptonitejesus]

I got two questions.

1) What would you guys say the best bang for your buck FireWire 800 is? I hear a lot of differing opinions on this one, so I'd like a couple suggestions, need over 500GB though. 750GB and up would probably be the best.

2) I've got 2 PATA hard-drives from my old Windows PC that crashed, what would you guys suggest doing about getting the data off of them? Most of the hard drive kits I found are for SATA, and the one I found for PATA was like $50 at Best Buy, I just want to get the data off these hard drives and junk 'em. I don't need bells and whistles and fancy enclosures.

THANKS GUYS!

 

[surftom]

There's always this: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2329300&CatId=3770

As far as drives are concerned, I would probably wait for USB3
To be honest the FW800 drives I have used are no faster than some of the external USB drives.

 

[Makosuke]

The quickie cable adapter linked by surftom is what I'd do for #2 as well--I bought one on sale at NewEgg for about $20 a while ago and it's happily gotten data off every SATA or PATA drive I've hooked to it.

Important note: At least on mine, if you plug the power supply in before attaching it to the drive, it won't work--it's presumably a cheap unregulated power supply, and the overvoltage seems to make the drive unhappy. So the connection order is: Plug power brick into drive, attach USB dongle to drive, plug power brick into wall, wait a few seconds and attach USB dongle to your Mac.

As for #1, I would strongly disagree on the speed contention--with a reasonably fast hard drive and a good FW800 case benchmarks routinely show FW800 as being at least twice as fast as USB2, and my own real-world experience with a WD 1.5TB drive in a NewerTech case backs this up--it's WAY faster on FW800 than USB2, particularly when transferring a large number of small files.

In terms of budget options, I've had reasonably good luck with Fantom devices--they're VERY cheap, but seem to work reliably, at least the ones I've owned.

If you want something a little more polished, try OWC (macsales.com)--their stuff is somewhat more expensive, but is well tested. Or just get a Macally or OWC empty case and pair it with the hard drive brand of your liking from NewEgg--that's what I usually do.