External hard drive enclosure recommendations?

NickHope wrote on 4/1/2008, 5:46 AM

I've had more than my share of trouble with external IEEE1394 hard drive enclosures over the years so this time I want to get it right.

I recently made the mistake of buying a Seagate FreeAgent external 750Gb hard drive off the net without seeing it first. It's OK for office use but the design makes it impratical for travelling. Difficult to pack and it looks like the base would be very easy to break. And I dislike the touch activated switch.

So I'm looking for a straightforward IEEE1394 enclosure that is rugged, reliable that supports SATA-300 750Gb or more so I can put one of my other drives in it. USB2 would be nice as well but not essential.

Any suggestions?

Comments

Cliff Etzel wrote on 4/1/2008, 6:51 AM

If you want portability, shlepping around a standard size hard drive isn't the way I would go mate (I take it you're editing on a laptop???)

Take a look at these drives - I have purchased from them and haven't been disappointed in the performance of their enclosures. Their 320GB enclosed drive comes with Firewire/eSata/USB. I guess it depends on the level of editing you're doing remotely. They use to have desktop drive enclosures, but not sure what happened to them (I have one of their desktop units as well - nice enclosure!).

If you want a raid setup, you might want to check out the G-raid mini (Stick 2-320GB laptop drives in it)

Cheers.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | ImmersiveVJ.com

farss wrote on 4/1/2008, 7:01 AM

Avoid LaCie, avoid any box using drives in RAID 0, look for boxes with a fan. Trying to find firewire enclosures is getting very hard though.

You could try something like this:
http://www.cooldrives.com/firewire-raid-sata-raid-system.html
which gives you RAID 1 and you can swap drives easily however it's barely luggable let alone portable.

If you could go to eSATA you'd have way more choices and speed.

Bob.

blink3times wrote on 4/1/2008, 7:27 AM

Funny... I'm looking for SOME kind of external as well. My problem is that I'm trying to add network storage, (and did so successfully), but the problem is spin down.... or lack of. My router (and therefore network storage) is centrally located, and it's a pain to have to get up, go downstairs, and turn on/off the usb external HDD.

Apparently, finding an external USB HDD that automatically spins down and goes standby after a settable idle, all by itself.... is not the easiest thing in the world.

NickHope wrote on 4/1/2008, 8:09 AM

Thanks for the tips guys.

Bob the cooldrives enclosure is just too big and heavy considering I'll be way over the baggage limit already.

I'm going away for 6 months. My plan is to capture and edit direct on my Dell laptop's internal 200GB drive. I'm expecting to come back with a couple of hundred GB of footage I get while I'm there. And I also want to take my entire archive of a little over 500GB with me.

Cliff, both those 2.5" products look promising. One of those might be ideal for archiving the footage I get during the trip.

But I still need a 3.5" enclosure for a 750GB drive to take my existing archive with some room for a 2nd copy of the trip footage.

Bob, this Seaagate I have has eSATA but I'm not impressed with the I/O performance when used with my desktop's (ASUS) eSATA port. I didn't time it but it didn't seem faster than IEEE1394. So I thought I'd just stick with the Dell laptop's onboard IEEE1394 port rather than buy an eSATA card for it. But I see what you mean about choice. Hardly any IEEE1394 enclosures around now. Maybe I'll just go USB2.0 and get one of these to go with the trays that I already own.

Coursedesign wrote on 4/1/2008, 9:15 AM

Get an IcyDock enclosure from Newegg.

Good prices, good quality,compact, trays, choice of FW400/FW800/eSata/USB 2.0 interfaces, ...

I love mine.

dcrandall wrote on 4/1/2008, 9:42 AM

I'll second the IcyDock enclosure recommendation.

-Dan

NickHope wrote on 4/1/2008, 10:10 AM

Looks good.

Anyone know if my Dell Precision M6300 laptop has firewire 400 or 800? I'm thinking just 400 but the documentation doesn't say.

Tinle wrote on 4/1/2008, 10:47 AM

Nick,
I recently built up a 500 Gb (Seagate 7200 rpm) eSata & USB 2 unit using a Newegg Rosewill box & eSata express card. I am very pleased with the responsiveness of the eSata with my laptop, It is much faster than I expected. I have too many bad memories with Firewire to use it if I have eSata as an option, USB 2.0 is too slow if eSata is available.

A recent test of eSata, firewire, or USB2 reported the following:
"On the 100MB random read test, the largest test offered by the program and the one most relevant to video editing, the eSATA read 62MB/sec, FireWire 800 57MB/sec, FireWire 400 41MB/sec, and USB 2.0 18MB/sec ."

NickHope wrote on 4/1/2008, 11:37 AM

Yeah firewire always sucked for me too. Lost count of the number of hours/weeks/months in the old days spent messing about with different enclosures/drivers/MS hotfixes etc. to try and make it reliable. In fact it sucked nearly as badly as early DVD-R technology! But (touching a lot of wood) firewire hasn't been too bad for me over the last couple of years.

Tinle which eSATA express card exactly did you get?

InterceptPoint wrote on 4/1/2008, 11:52 AM

CourseDesign/DCRandall:

What would recommend from IcyDock for:

Fan Cooled.
USB 2.0
Fastest 750 GB or 1 TB drive
Single Bay

And what would be the best drive choice?

johnmeyer wrote on 4/1/2008, 12:55 PM

While I realize that this isn't what Nick originally asked for, I thought I'd include it anyway. After purchasing over a dozen external enclosures in the past two years, I finally found this one. It has a fantastic combination of price, size, cooling, metal enclosure, reliable drivers, etc. Only problem is that it is USB and IDE. The USB is fine, because I think the performance is as good as 1394 for most applications. However, IDE drives are getting harder to find, and so far they don't make it in any other configuration. Here's the link to Newegg where I purchased five of them:

Coolmax CD-390B-U2

I take the closeout drives that I get for $30-50 and put them in these enclosures. Amazingly cheap way to get a lot of relatively high performance storage.

Tinle wrote on 4/1/2008, 3:04 PM

Nick,

The two socket eSata express card I use is:
Newegg.com Item#: N82E16839200006 $39.99
Rosewill RC-605 SATAII ExpressCard 2 x SATA - Retail

As with firewire, use a good quality cable for eSata

Cheers,

Tinle

craftech wrote on 4/1/2008, 7:05 PM

I just saw an article in Event DV covering this. The article is by Jan Ozer and is entitled Editing with eSATA.

You may find the article very helpful as are most of Jan Ozer's articles.

John

NickHope wrote on 4/7/2008, 11:51 PM

CourseDesign, DCRandall, which IcyDock do you recommend? The screwless ones? There are loads of models. Ideally I'd like to be able to easily switch hard drives in the enclosure.

The choice of eSATA express cards seems to be expanding since I last researched it so I'm looking at that option again now. Weird how laptops haven't got eSATA sockets on board yet.

farss wrote on 4/8/2008, 1:04 AM

"Weird how laptops haven't got eSATA sockets on board yet. "

The luggable high end ones do but there's a price to pay and it's not just dollars.

Bob.

TGS wrote on 4/8/2008, 1:20 AM

Not what you were looking for either, but I just happened to be at NewEgg and thought this was pretty interesting. Will hold up to 2 1TB hard drives, USB 2, Has a fan, for $40.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817193042