Oh yes.. I have been using removable racks like these for a few years..

I primarily got the firewire case because I am taking some television production classes, and the lab at my school is all MacG4's with FinalCut Pro. I am all PC and exclusively use VegasVideo at home. I mostly wanted an easy way to transport raw DV footage between the two, and a way to bring my own storage for FinalCut projects rather than have to squat on their drives (and have to worry about getting the same workstation at every lab session).

But the sales pitches for these firewire cases gave the impression that not only would they provide video-grade performance, but that you'd get MORE throughput than most standard UltraATA controllers. I mean how can you sell a Firewire device, sell it through all the major online video retailers and not make it able to handle a single NTSC DV stream??

I actually bought another removable IDE housing and attempted to install it INSIDE the Firewire case, but it was too deep.

how many of these racks do you guys have set up at one time on one PC? I have two HDs and a CDrom setup internally on my editing PC, with the ADS pyro external case (80 GB HD in it) as a firewire connection... question is.. how many IDE HDs can a PC handle? I never really thought about that...

You may have two devices per IDE port. Most motherboards have at least two IDE ports. Many of the newer ones have a pair of standard IDE ports and another pair for RAID, making 4 total. If you have free slots, you can add IDE interface cards which usually have two ports. So, with an IDE RAID motherboard and a couple of cards you could have 16 IDE drives installed. Windows 98, ME, and NT will probably run out of available interrupts though. XP should be able to handle it.

make sure there are NO jumpers on the WD - you want it set up as SINGLE - again remove ALL jumper on the WD 120 ...

IMO WD's don't like firewire cases .. i have 3 of the WD 120 w/8mgs .. the firewire also limits these 120's in performance ... i ended up putting them in pull outs and put my old maxtor 80gigs in the firewire cases ... the wd's 120's w8mg are FAST !!!

With a mobile rack you can have as many "portable" drives as you wish. For my purposes I have a single large internal drive which holds my primary OS and applications along with several drives mounted in racks which I switch in and out as needed. You can just pop them in and out. I demoted my Maxtor firewire to long term stoarage only for the reasons explained in another thread. In fact if you wanted, you can do away with any internal drive at all and "boot" off the drive in the rack. This gives you the option to have multiple operatings systems, or for a family to in effect have their "own" computer and never a worry about someone messing up the other guy's system or files.

No problem here with 5400rpm Maxtors in external cases (including pre-911 ADS). In fact, on my capture system (P2-350) they're faster than eide.

Use raptest to check the actual throughput (http://www.canopuscorp.com/products/utilities.php3).

raptest doesn't seem to give the letter of the removable drive as one of the choices either

I think the firewire drives are a better choice for portability.

1394 controllers are cheap ($25-$75) and have 2-3 ports, plus you can daisy chain the firewire drives so you have plenty of connections. most of us already have a firewire card for DV transfers so buying an extra controller is not necessary.

with IDE most people might be able to fit two mobile racks in their case and you have to reboot your computer every time you insert or remove a drive. that means with IDE you get 2 drives at a time which have to be configured with the correct jumper setting for Master/Slave/Single depending on whether your using both at once or one at a time and if you are using both make sure one is master and the other is slave, but to do that I have to remove the IDE drives from their enclosures every time... in other words it's a huge pain in the ass compared to firewire drives if you really are going to use them for portability.

with firewire you just plug in the drive and it appears in your list. plug in another and it appears. plug in some more if you want. no rebooting. no jumpers. yank it off one PC and stick on the other and work away.

as for the external power issue, that's actually an advantage of external drives. power strips are cheap and that means your internal power supply is not taking the extra load.

one thing that sounds cool about the mobile rack IDE idea is having different hard drives for different family members. each could have their own OS to themselves... interesting idea.

In theory yes. The problem is "real world" firewire type drives and their external power supplies apparently can't handle repeated yanking and installing of the power connector no matter how carefully you do it. At least not the several Maxtor's I've worked through.

Just for the heck of it, (your experience may differ), I caculated how many times I pulled/added back the power supply to my 1st Maxtor to move it from system to sytem. Sadly the number is very low. In about 8 months of use I estimate I only 'pulled the plug' around 100 times. Then the interface card failed. On two different drives. The second drive didn't last half as long. I'm now on my third. Who knows, you may get lucky.

Obviously not being happy, I complained and the Maxtor rep went to great lengths to claim the Maxtor 80GB and similar firewire models they offer are NOT PORTABLE, rather they are just external. So unless you plan to just leave them sit there and rarely if ever unplug them and take them with you as you would if you intended to use them for portability, expect an interface card failure in your near feature.

There is an article at one one the major online computer magazines and the approve/disapprove rate for the external Maxtor drives is a sky high 54% disaproval rating with many reporting similar problems I did. There is nothing wrong with the Maxtor drive itself. The problem is the internal interface card. I explained how to recover "lost" data. :-)

As to the mobile rack option, any drive in a rack should ALWAYS be set to slave unless you plan to boot off it in which case there would be no other drive necessary in your computer(s). How easy are they to add/remove? A snap. You don't open the inside of your PC case. They slip in and out of the caddie. Total time to insert/remove, about two seconds. LOL!

If Windows assigned it a letter then raptest will see it. I just tried it with my removable rack inna ADS case.

I completely forget the rest of the thread now. Could you have accidently assigned an already used drive letter to it (and now it won't mount)? You see it in Disk Manager?

I just picked up one of those ADS boxes. Stuck in a WD 80-gig 7200 RPM drive. If you note the little jumper setting diagram on the top of the drive case, the setting (as suggested by db) to set the drive as the ONLY drive (neither slave nor master) is the one to use - and it's selected by removing the jumper (as db also pointed out). I couldn't believe this could be right, so I went skimming through the little instruction booklet that came with the drive. It could be more clearly indicated in the instructions, but, it is in there.

My drive works fine. I just tested it with VV30.

I also have had good experience with the Maxtor external firewire drives. Setting up the ADS box is a bit more time consuming than setting up the Maxtors, but not much more, and, apparently, you can put most anything in these boxes, HD's, CDR/RW's, DVD drives, etc.

Someone told me I could swap out the Maxtor drives from their cases and put anything in them, as well, but I haven't had the inclination to tinker with them at this point . . . why fix "what ain't broke"?

Both types seem to work fine on my system.

Caruso