External Firewire drive on the Fritz!

[Gravity]

I purchased a cheap 120 GB (7200 rpm) external firewire drive on ebay, for my Dual 1Ghz G4. The drive worked for about a year, then I noticed it started having trouble getting up to speed and mounting.

After a while, it wouldn't mount at all.

Recognizing the enclosure as a "kit," I ripped the thing open to find an IBM Deskstar HD inside. While I don't have available drive bays in my G4, I temporarily disconnected one of the internal drives...and to my delight found that there was nothing wrong with the IBM drive. Bonus!

My dilemma is that I don't want to purchase the same kind of enclosure that it had, because I don't consider them reliable. However, they seem to be the most popular...and cost around $80-$100. I found a cheaper drive enclosure on ebay for $42, but I don't know if that will prove any more reliable.

Any of you have some success in this sort of thing?

 

[Chip NoVaMac]

Did you update to 10.3.6 perhaps? There is a FW issue with that update. If you did go to 10.3.6, you can see about finding another Mac with 10.3.5 or lower and see if the drive works. If so, you can see if you can find an update for the firmware.

 

[Gravity]

It's not 10.3.6, but a faulty switch...

I think my problem was a faulty switch. Sometimes jiggling the switch on and off helped the drive power up to speed...and would mount. But lately, it wouldn't mount at all.

Until I tried taking out the drive and installing it directly in my mac. Drive works great.

So now I'm hoping that the next enclosure I've purchased lasts longer. I simply don't have enough hard drive bays for all the Ultra ATA 100 drives I'd like to use. And the ATA 66 drives don't have the speed or the capacity at a decent price point to use with Video capture/editing purposes. So I'm not bothering to fill those drive bays at all. But adding firewire ports is easy with PCI cards...

 

[jeremy.king]

ATA66 is faster than firewire

ATA66 is 66MB/sec = 528Mbps
Firewire is 400Mbps


Which firewire enclosures are you looking at? Which had problems? Why the discreetness?