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rumorsandmore

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 5, 2010
5
0
Just curious. Seems to me that would be a great product to have for Mac owners. Any idea why there isn't any on the market?
 

rumorsandmore

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 5, 2010
5
0
There are enclosures for P/S-ATA HDDs with Firewire ports. Or what do you mean specifically?
I meant specifically, but while we're on the subject. What makes ext. enclosures so expensive. I know there are cheap ones but what would be the difference between the cheaper and $80-100+ ones?
 

spinnerlys

Guest
Sep 7, 2008
14,328
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forlod bygningen
I meant specifically, but while we're on the subject. What makes ext. enclosures so expensive. I know there are cheap ones but what would be the difference between the cheaper and $80-100+ ones?

The chipsets, especially for FW enclosures, they cost a fortune sometimes. It's cheaper to just get an HDD in a FW enclosure.

When I bought my FW enclosures (2000-2003), I always tried to get ones with an Oxford chipset, thus it was a bit more expensive (10-20€).
 

RedTomato

macrumors 601
Mar 4, 2005
4,157
442
.. London ..
I have an ancient PATA enclosure, almost 10 years old with FW port that I opened up and modified to take two drives several years ago. I then added a PATA/SATA convertor last year so that it now takes SATA drives.

So there you have it. SATA -> PATA -> Firewire.

Last week my Time Capsule died, so I just dug it out of the garage a few hours ago to take over my TM backups while I sort out my dead TC with Apple.

You can get empty externals pretty cheap if you look on the net. USB ones are dirt cheap. PATA / FW ones are cheap. SATA / FW ones were a bit more last time I looked. 2.5inch SATA / FW enclosures were rare and pricy last time I looked. I really wanted one at the time as the FW carried more juice and was faster than the USB connection.

BTW TM over Firewire absolutely rocks. Zero to full backup in a couple of hours, while with TC over gigabit ethernet was an overnight job.
 

chown33

Moderator
Staff member
Aug 9, 2009
10,758
8,451
A sea of green
Just curious. Seems to me that would be a great product to have for Mac owners. Any idea why there isn't any on the market?

There are:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/FWU2ES2HDK/

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Diskology/DISKJOCK/

There's also a device a friend of mine has, one side attaches to any single SATA or PATA disk, and the other side presents a USB or Firewire connection. I don't recall the name or model number, but it's a handy device.

EDIT:
The "handy device" is this:
http://www.antarespro.com/1419122-i...+Serial+ATA+PATA.aspx?sgd=330d318d318d317d309
 

rumorsandmore

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 5, 2010
5
0
There are:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/FWU2ES2HDK/

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Diskology/DISKJOCK/

There's also a device a friend of mine has, one side attaches to any single SATA or PATA disk, and the other side presents a USB or Firewire connection. I don't recall the name or model number, but it's a handy device.

EDIT:
The "handy device" is this:
http://www.antarespro.com/1419122-i...+Serial+ATA+PATA.aspx?sgd=330d318d318d317d309
The edit "handy device" is exactly what this post was looking for EXCEPT with Firewire connections. I have one of these but it would be really "handy" with Firewire support. So I was wondering why there isn't one on the market??
 
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