External firewire case for ex macbook HD

adsl3g

adsl3g

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Can anyone tell me where i can get an external enclosure for my ex Macbook HD - 2.5 inch sata 80gb? I can't seem to find any locally that have FW 400 support and USB2- only USB2. I have the USB2 enclosure but want to go firewire as well.

Are the FW 400 enclosures powered off the FW port or do you need an external power supply? (My current encl has a USB power cable as well)
 
I wish I could find a 2.5" external enclosure that can take external power. Running 'n 4200rpm disc from USB power is OK, but a lot of 5400rpm drives use too much power for some machines. Don't even want to know how it is with 7200rpm discs.
 
koffiejunkie said:
I wish I could find a 2.5" external enclosure that can take external power. Running 'n 4200rpm disc from USB power is OK, but a lot of 5400rpm drives use too much power for some machines. Don't even want to know how it is with 7200rpm discs.
Click to expand...
You can often supplement many of the drives with power from a second usb2 port.
 
Unfortunately this is not FireWire, but I thought I'd mention it anyway:

http://en.vipower.com/products01_01.php?ID=60&Search=true

They are availabe in S.A. under a different brand - E-Force. I got one from PC International in Randburg for about R180. It's an aluminium chassis, with a very uncomplicated mounting mechanism. It has a hard connector for IDE and power (not a flimsy cable). Runs nice and quiet too.

My notebook can hardly power a USB flash drive, so I have an external powered USB hub for this. Works very nicely.
 
Yes, I have the ViPowER version, as bwana indicated. Works quite nicely, but I am only using it via USB2 (it comes with an additional USB -> Power cable), and I have to use this, otherwise the drive doesn't get enough power.

WRT the FW though ... It doesn't seem to work too well for me. I think the drive cannot handle all the speed, stopping and starting at will, during copies or whatever you might be busy with.

adsl3g, check out www.sybaritic.co.za ... I got mine there. If you are looking for FW400/FW800 cables to borrow to test, I have one of each.
 
LandyMan, maybe you should try the firewire with the USB power cable plugged in - it sounds like it's not getting enough power.
 
LandyMan said:
Yes, I have the ViPowER version, as bwana indicated. Works quite nicely, but I am only using it via USB2 (it comes with an additional USB -> Power cable), and I have to use this, otherwise the drive doesn't get enough power.

WRT the FW though ... It doesn't seem to work too well for me. I think the drive cannot handle all the speed, stopping and starting at will, during copies or whatever you might be busy with.

adsl3g, check out www.sybaritic.co.za ... I got mine there. If you are looking for FW400/FW800 cables to borrow to test, I have one of each.
Click to expand...

Is that an SATA enclosure or an IDE - I can't seem to find a SATA enclosure with FW.
 
Thought so - unless i was reading wrong - BTW, I have a external 80gb USB2 drive (IDE) and my ex Macbook 80GB Sata which I mounted in the VIPowER USB2 SATA. The SATA is OSX formatted and the difference in speed is quite noticeable between the 2 externals. Is this as a result of the OSX format or SATA vs IDE. The IDE is fat32 formatted.
 
adsl3g said:
Thought so - unless i was reading wrong - BTW, I have a external 80gb USB2 drive (IDE) and my ex Macbook 80GB Sata which I mounted in the VIPowER USB2 SATA. The SATA is OSX formatted and the difference in speed is quite noticeable between the 2 externals. Is this as a result of the OSX format or SATA vs IDE. The IDE is fat32 formatted.
Click to expand...
Could be a combination of things. Not all enclosures are the same so that could skew things as well. Are the disks both 5400 rpm?
 
You can't really compare it this way. You have two different discs (which my have different amounts of cache mem), two different types of controllers, two different filesystems.

I had two Seagate internal 200GB discs - both 7200rpm with 8mb cache. One was SATA and the other IDE. They even had the same model number, except for the 'S' at the end to indicate SATA. The IDE disc outperformed the SATA in almost everything, most notably in sustained writes. Now, both IDE and SATA has can handle a higher sustained data transfer rate than a 7200rpm disc can read or write, so I can only imagine that the IDE controller I had was of better quality than the SATA controller.

I guess IDE controllers tend to be better hardware because when they were introduced you couln't borrow any CPU cycles for any of the driver functions. But most SATA controllers I've worked with seem offload a lot of work to the drivers and thus to your CPU, so that might explain it.
 
Oooh this is nice! This is the first 2.5" enclosure I've come across that can take external power. Naaaaais!

Ctrl+D
 
Dude, I'm at work, where I'm stuck with a PC. With a Microsoft keyboard :-( At least I'm not running Windows on it....

That said, I'm pretty sure in FireFox on my Mac it's also Ctrl+D. Or is it Command+D?
 
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