Moving HDs from Mac Pro to External

[kcdude]

I have 4 hard drives (Mac OS Journal formatted) that I want to move from my Mac Pro to an external enclosure. Then I want to be able to access the drives with my new Mac Pro. They contain data now and I obviously don't want to format them. Do I need to do anything to set up the external enclosure? Should I set it up first, attach it to the Mac Pro and then transfer the data? Or can I just remove them, pop them in the enclosure and connect to the MP?

Any recommendations on a 4 bay enclosure?

 

[kcdude]

FWIW, I purchased a cheap $25 SATA enclosure, removed the drive, installed in the enclosure and connected back to the MP....works perfectly.

 

[GoKyu]

Did you find that having external drives slows you down a bit when the MP accesses those drives?

I have a Mac Pro too, and at one time moved my iTunes library to an external disk...Every time I played music or movies, the whole computer would lag for several seconds until the drive "caught up to speed".

That's why I won't use external drives anymore - I just upgraded all my internal drives instead.

 

[kcdude]

I just did some limited file movement to confirm it would still recognize the drive without formatting it for the enclosure. I think it is safe to say that it would run slow as molasses over USB versus internal.

I'm curious to see how a TB external with non-ssd drives connected to a MBP run versus internal drives on a MP...got my fingers crossed and hope the drives are the limiting factor.