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As long as the drive partition can be read with Mac OS should see it ok, just fit the HD into the enclosure (set jumper to master) If possible copy the data to another drive, format that one to FAT32, copy the data back (Mac OS can't read NTFS, but it can read FAT32?)

The problem with external enclosures is the chipset inside the box...enough for me to junk my two optical and HD enclosures and say sod it to portable writing/HD use and just get a desktop, really pain in the ... with external enclosures. Good idea but need to get fully compatible chipsets (over USB 2 and firewire)
 
It will work fine. I'd recommend a firewire box as the overall performance is better than USB2 and you can daisychain devices.

OS X will only read NTFS partitions but will read and write FAT32.

I'm using a 200Gb drive pulled from my PC in a Combo USB2 and Firewire enclosure on a MacBook Pro. I've also got a 2.5" and 5.25" enclosure with a 60Gb hard drive and a DVD burner daisychained off.
 
i use an icybox and would not recommend it. best caddies to get are the ones that make full contact with the hard drive so that they can transfer the heat off them more efficiently.

icybox has not given me any problems but my cousin uses a caddy which like above makes full contact with the drive and the caddies surface to provide better cooling.
 
MagicBoy said:
I'd recommend a firewire box as the overall performance is better than USB2 and you can daisychain devices.
Click to expand...

is firewire really better than usb2?

i thought firewire was 50mb/s and usb2.0 60mb/s?

maybe im wrong.
 
alucks said:
is firewire really better than usb2?

i thought firewire was 50mb/s and usb2.0 60mb/s?

maybe im wrong.
Click to expand...

In short (have a look on Google/Wikipedia for more info) :

Firewire and USB were designed for different jobs. The original idea was for PCs to carry both sets of ports - USB to replace parallel/serial/PS2 etc and Firewire to replace SCSI for high bandwidth connections.

Apple wanted to charge a license fee per firewire port and other companies took umbridge so Intel bolted on a turbo and we got USB2.

Firewire was designed by Apple as a replacement for SCSI in the late 90s. It gives consistent data transfer rates with low CPU usage which is why it's ideal for digital video and storage. It's a peer to peer design so two firewire devices can talk to each other without the CPU having to supervise.

USB 2 has a faster headline rate but this is a burst rate and not consistently achievable. USB is host controlled so the CPU supervises all activity, and the star design of the network makes scheduling more difficult.

My hard drive boxes are USB2 and Firewire. Using HDTach the data transfer rates are higher and with lower CPU usage on Firewire. I'll get a consistent 33-34Mb/sec on Firewire with 5% CPU whereas the USB tops out at 22Mb/sec with 15% CPU and the graph is all over the place. I'm not saying this is absolute proof - it will likely vary somewhat with the controller chips in the enclosure and PC.
 
Why not just get the external box, see if the Mac can read and write to ntfs, if it can't put it back in pc and use Partition manager 8 to convert it to a format the mac can use. Then sell the pc. :) After again checking the mac can read and write to the new format.
 
deadeyedic30 said:
Why not just get the external box, see if the Mac can read and write to ntfs, if it can't put it back in pc and use Partition manager 8 to convert it to a format the mac can use. Then sell the pc. :) After again checking the mac can read and write to the new format.
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Did you not read the rest of the thread? OS X will not write to NTFS partitions out of the box.
 
MagicBoy said:
I believe Partition Magic will convert NTFS drives to FAT32. I personally wouldn't be happy doing this without a full backup of the data.
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Well It can, but Partition Magic is not that reliable, and has been labeled Partition Tragic ;).

You'd also have a problem with NTFS permissions, so what I'd do, is move the data to another drive, reformat the drive to go into the box to fat, and then move the data back across.
 
Cyber-Mav said:
i use an icybox and would not recommend it. best caddies to get are the ones that make full contact with the hard drive so that they can transfer the heat off them more efficiently.

icybox has not given me any problems but my cousin uses a caddy which like above makes full contact with the drive and the caddies surface to provide better cooling.
Click to expand...

What make of caddie would you recommend?
 
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