external HD enclosure

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artCROSS

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I'm planning on an external drive to store my audio files using an internal HD in an external case. I'm looking for an external case w/ Oxford 911 chipset, but i was wondering whether or not it mattered if the internal drive was Serial ATA or IDE. Would there be any difference in speed considering its going through the firewire interface? thanks
 
To the best of my knowledge (which isn't much), I do believe all of the FireWire enclosures I've seen use IDE drives.
It would be somewhat pointless to have a 150MBps SATA drive connected to a 400Mbps/50MBps controller. Not to say that it couldn't be done, but what would be the point?
Any decent 7200 RPM 8 meg cache IDE drive will be fine.
 
thanks for the reply...do you know anywhere to get a cheap enclosure w/ oxford 911? Cheapest I've found so far is $40 w/o shipping
 
Sure don't ..... I just went (well ... not just went, but several months ago) to Best Buy and got a Western Digital jobbie. This one, to be exact.
Works just fine.
I'm sure if you search around enough you'll find a decent price on what your looking for.
 
artCROSS said:
I'm planning on an external drive to store my audio files using an internal HD in an external case. I'm looking for an external case w/ Oxford 911 chipset, but i was wondering whether or not it mattered if the internal drive was Serial ATA or IDE. Would there be any difference in speed considering its going through the firewire interface? thanks
Click to expand...

Am not sure if the serial ATA would be faster, have always wondered about that
myself. Anyways, I use the Bytecc enclosures, the USB 2 kind, and I find them to be solid and very reasonably priced. BTW, they have a serial ATA version, a USB2/1394 combo, a straight firewire and USB 2. ;)

http://www.coolerexpress.com/cooler-express/byal3hadrexe.html
 
There would be no advantage to SATA in a USB or Firewire device, as the limiting factor is the wire protocol itself. Try

http://www.bensbargains.net/

It's a great site for finding available bargains. There was an enclosure advertised there yesterday for $25, I think.
 
Is there anyway to tell if an enclosure has the Oxford 911 chipset? some enclosures online don't tell much about their product. While we're at it, do I even need Oxford 911? I'll be using this drive to record/playback 25+ tracks. THanks!
 
and sorry, last question (probably not, but for now :) i have an external sound card (Edirol FA-101) that goes through firewire...will it affect the speed if i Daisy chain the two together? I was thinking about just getting the usb2.0 kind, but I read somewhere on here that it can cause beeps/blips, and it might not be able to run as fast as firewire at a constant rate. I wish they made a cheap FW800 enclosure...
 
If it doesn't explicitly say that it is Oxford 911, then assume that it is not. Yes, I would strongly recommend that you stick with the Oxford chipset, as there have been known issues with others. If you daisychain your drive and soundcard, then yes, speed will be affected. There is only 400Mbps of available bandwidth on the firewire bus and that must be shared between all devices on it. With USB2.0, you may end up with those blips in the sound...that has been my experience.

I have a Motu 828mkII firewire audio interface and a WiebeTech Firewire400/800/USB2.0 enclosure and what I did was run my Motu into my computer's existing Firewire 400 port, and then get a separate Firewire 800 card for the drive enclosure.

The type of drive you will be using will not matter. Even at the speed of Firewire 800 (800 Mbps = 100 MB/s), the firewire bus is still slower than your basic ATA133 IDE hard drive. I went ahead and got an enclosure that supports both IDE and SATA incase with the growing prevalence of SATA drives they actually become cheaper than IDE.
 
that answered a lot of my questions, thanks! I have a FW800 port on my powerbook...is that connected to my FW400 at all? I wouldn't mind getting a FW800 enclosure, i just can't find any.
 
If you have separate FW800 and FW400 ports, then those are considered to be separate FW busses....however they still share whatever bandwidth is available on the PCI bus (or whatever Mac uses as the PCI bus). Of course, you would hit that same limitation on an internal drive, so you should be ok if you use and FW800 enclosure.

The one problem with FW800 enclosures is that they are expensive! The WiebeTech ToughTech 800 is a really good enclosure for about $120.

http://www.wiebetech.com/products/toughtech.php

It uses the Oxford OXUF922 chipset (which is the best FW800 chipset) and also supports USB2.0 and FW400. I know it's expensive...but if you want good stuff you're going to have to pay a little more for it.
 
Insightnsound said:
Many drives and enclosures to choose from. I've ordered a few products from them and have not been disappointed.

Various enclosures
http://www.xpcgear.com/35enclosure.html

5.25"/3.5" Firewire IEEE1394 (Oxford 911 Chip) External IDE Hard Drive
http://www.xpcgear.com/35525exhardr1.html
Click to expand...

Not to be rude or anything, but it really looks like those people have no clue what they are talking about. They list an internal power supply as a contributor to a cool operating environment for the hard drive. What the heck are they talking about? Since when did power supplies stop generating heat? Sure integrated power supplies can be neat and all that, but they most certainly don't COOL anything. My WiebeTech has the power transformer in a lump on the power cable, with slight voltage stepdown internally for the power connections. Much cooler than anything internal.
 
Yeah, that is a fairly strange statement to make. Maybe they got the technology from the cold heat soldering tool people. :D
 
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