External Enclosure

[hity645]

I searched around, didn't find anything useful so Im starting this thread.

Im got one of them w00t drives, 250gb IDE 2mb cache I'd like to slap in an external enclosure. USB 2.0 or NIC.

I read some reviews on neweggs site about enclosures with NICs and some people had issues.

This is a storage only, maybe large transfers every now and then for backups, swapping files etc.

I found one that caught my eye at zipzoom: Here

Newegg has it as well for cheaper last I checked, but I prefer Zipzoom.
Thoughts Ideas? Recommendations?

 

[davidlem]

Any reason you'd want to transfer at 2MB/s (NIC) instead of more than 20MB/s (USB/Firewire)? Will this external drive be located more than 15ft from the machine it is connected to at any time?

 

[unhappy_mage]

Any reason you'd want to transfer at 2MB/s (NIC) instead of more than 20MB/s (USB/Firewire)? Will this external drive be located more than 15ft from the machine it is connected to at any time?

There must be something wrong with your system. I'd expect 10 MB/s over network and 30-40 over USB. And having it on the network is much more convenient than direct connection.

 

[davidlem]

There must be something wrong with your system. I'd expect 10 MB/s over network and 30-40 over USB. And having it on the network is much more convenient than direct connection.

I was just giving example numbers. I didn't see him say how many people share his network. I also didn't see him say if he used 10Mbit or 100Mbit or Gigabit ethernet. So unless you have access to information I do not, your numbers are just as imaginary.

And yes, I get far more than the numbers I mentioned. But again, you don't know what my setup is - 2MB/s would be great over 10Mbit. So instead of picking apart people's posts and taking things off topic, why not try to address the OP's question?

 

[perplex]

What is a great external enclosure? Something that has great build quality, so maybe plastic with rubber layer to soften small impacts. I was thinking firewire would be essential feature, but is there much difference in performance? I think build quality is more important maybe.

 

[davidlem]

What is a great external enclosure? Something that has great build quality, so maybe plastic with rubber layer to soften small impacts. I was thinking firewire would be essential feature, but is there much difference in performance? I think build quality is more important maybe.

USB 2.0 is rated at 480Mbit burst speed, but will not sustain these speeds over a shared channel.

Firewire 400 (IEEE1394a) is rated at 400Mbit sustained and comes very close to the truth.

Firewire 800 (IEEE1394b) is rated at 800Mbit sustained and, at least in my personal experience, approaches double the real-world speed of FW400.

 

[hity645]

If it runs on the network it'll be right next to my router, on 100. Later down the road I might get everything switched over to gigabit.

 

[jmroberts70]

Strangely, there's only one external enclosure that comes with built-in gigabit ethernet. Sadly, it also comes with 1TB of hard drives and a hefty price (around $700). The Buffalo Terastation. Were it not for the fact that I've already built my gigabit-based fileserver, I may have considered this unit instead. I'm sure the price will come down (I know Fry's often sells this guy with a $50 mail-in rebate).

Now on the budget side, there's the iOne EN-35 external enclosure. I did a glowing review (and comparison with cheaper basic external enclosures) here on the [H] a few months ago. This baby does come with built-in ethernet and some of the best cooling I've ever seen. The drawback to the networking on this baby is that the drives have to formatted for FAT32. I talked with the manufacturer about this and they told me that they're working on the next version of this enclosure right now. They're expecting to release it later this year (with NTFS support). I have been using mine on a daily basis and coudn't be happier. Eventhough the website says this will support up to 400GB drives, I've been running a 500GB drive without a single problem. It's a bit pricer than your average external enclosure but it's well worth the cash IMO... Hope this helps.

 

[hity645]

Now on the budget side, there's the iOne EN-35 external enclosure. I did a glowing review (and comparison with cheaper basic external enclosures) here on the [H] a few months ago. This baby does come with built-in ethernet and some of the best cooling I've ever seen. The drawback to the networking on this baby is that the drives have to formatted for FAT32. I talked with the manufacturer about this and they told me that they're working on the next version of this enclosure right now. They're expecting to release it later this year (with NTFS support). I have been using mine on a daily basis and coudn't be happier. Eventhough the website says this will support up to 400GB drives, I've been running a 500GB drive without a single problem. It's a bit pricer than your average external enclosure but it's well worth the cash IMO... Hope this helps.

Yeah I saw your review in my search but it didn't answer the questions I was looking for. When you do massive writing to the drive over the network, does it have errors? Crash? that sort of thing? Thats basically what Im concerened about, when I format I move tons of stuff around and I'd like this to be the temp storage drive. Throw it on all at once, and take it off when Im done formatting. Close to 150GB of stuff. That is a drag about it only working with FAT32, but oh well.