firewire sata enclosures?

ringo747 · 25 Jan 2007 at 10:58

is it just me or does ocuk not do any firewire enclosures that take sata drives? I can see firewire IDE ones but not sata. If i am right is there any such thing as a firewire sata enclosure and what models would people recommend? Thanks

rpstewart · 25 Jan 2007 at 11:03

I don't know of one. I take it you have a spare SATA drive lying around that you'd like to use?

mosfet · 25 Jan 2007 at 11:51

I was looking for one of these recently and have been equally frustrated. It's not just OCUK, very few retailers do them. SATA drive make up the majority of HDD sales now, yet enclosures are still nearly all IDE, it's irritating.

I'm probably going to sell my internal drive and get a firewire external HDD like a MyBook Premium.

ringo747 · 25 Jan 2007 at 13:02

yeah spare SATA drive here so wanted to fire it into an enclosure. I wouldnt buy an IDE drive no more now that SATA is more common as you say. I think a normal firewire external drive is my only option. Mybook range probably the best out there?

tsinc80697 · 25 Jan 2007 at 14:38

exactly same boat as me, looks like i might have to sell my WD 500gb, just to buy another in a Mybook enclosure :/
But the Mybooks are quite cheap, the 500GB firewire 400/800 seems a decent price and ive only heard good things about them so far!

ringo747 · 25 Jan 2007 at 15:44

its definitely worth a try. Handy thing about enclosures is the ability to swap disks in and out etc but if im just using it along with my laptop and nothing else then a normal external drive should be ok. What you think of the passport notebook external drives?

mosfet · 25 Jan 2007 at 16:08

I think the advantage of being bus powered is outweighed by the massive difference in price per gigabyte that 2.5" drives demand, I'd happily put up with plugging in a drive when I want to use it if it saves me as much money as it does.

For desktop machines external 2.5" drives generally aren't worth it unless you're going to be using away from home often, or with a laptop.

As for MyBooks, I've got a 500GB edition and swear by it. I'm saving up for another but Firewire this time.

tsinc80697 · 25 Jan 2007 at 21:17

the only ting pushing me towards NAS over external hard drive is that i can sit downstairs on wireless and access my files without lugging a hard drive around with me.
But only thing against it is iTunes runs a lot slower through networked music and i have to cancel something everytime i start iTunes up as it tries to sync everything which uses up 3mb/sec which causes my macbook to stall a bit