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Good, cheap external hd enclosure

R

Rakinos

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 31, 2001
Messages
1,520
I have a 200 gig ide hard drive sitting here with nowhere for it to go :(. Does anyone have a link to a good quality hard drive enclosure at a good price?

Thanks in advance
 
I've had great resuts with this model.

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16817145385

Now I'm not an expert my any means and I don't know anyting about transfer rates, etc. I do know that it it's rock solid and that since it's aliminum it dissipates heat well. I only uses mine for archiving so how it would handle under constant use I don't know.

Some people prefer fans for cooling but the way I see it that's just one more thing to break and take up space. A fan also brings in dust which won't help the drive's life.

I plug it into my Xp machine and it works. It never gets hot only very warm. Good luck.
 
if you have xp sp2 - watchout for some of the cheaper firewire (or firewire + usb combo) devices - some use a chipset that corrupts data when used in firewire mode. I found this out the hard way :-/
 
Would you happen to have more info on this?



cieje said:
if you have xp sp2 - watchout for some of the cheaper firewire (or firewire + usb combo) devices - some use a chipset that corrupts data when used in firewire mode. I found this out the hard way :-/
Click to expand...

 
the problem is with any device that uses the Prolific PL3507 firewire chipset. It's a known issue by them and microsoft. There have been some firmware updates from prolific but it doesn't work for all devices it seems, only some.

if you just google "Prolific PL-3507" you'll see tons and tons of forums etc talking about the problems. There's a continual "blog" about it here:

http://www.bustrace.com/delayedwrite/guestbook.php

here's a hotfix that m$ hasn't yet released that's supposed to fix it... supposedly
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885464

the main problem is that the chipset is still being produced and sold... despite these issues that have not been fixed. I lost 400g+ of data because of this problem. luckily I could recover with Ontrack, but it was still a pain. Now I only use my device as USB 2.0...

Another supposed way to fix it is to pull the firewire driver from the sp1 cabs and force sp2 to use that instead, but I haven't tried it yet.
 
cieje said:
the problem is with any device that uses the Prolific PL3507 firewire chipset. It's a known issue by them and microsoft. There have been some firmware updates from prolific but it doesn't work for all devices it seems, only some.

if you just google "Prolific PL-3507" you'll see tons and tons of forums etc talking about the problems. There's a continual "blog" about it here:

http://www.bustrace.com/delayedwrite/guestbook.php

here's a hotfix that m$ hasn't yet released that's supposed to fix it... supposedly
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885464

the main problem is that the chipset is still being produced and sold... despite these issues that have not been fixed. I lost 400g+ of data because of this problem. luckily I could recover with Ontrack, but it was still a pain. Now I only use my device as USB 2.0...

Another supposed way to fix it is to pull the firewire driver from the sp1 cabs and force sp2 to use that instead, but I haven't tried it yet.
Click to expand...


Wow, thanks! One thing is that many manufacturers and/or retailers wont show this type of information for these type of enclosures. They'll just say USB/FIREWIRE, but not exactly what chipset.

 
any other suggestions? (I guess I'll go with just usb to be safe, though)
 
The thermaltake Max 4 is quite nice. It will keep your drive nice and cool, it VERY quiet (I almost never hear mine), looks awesome, windows has drivers for it. USB only, but I have been very satisfied with mine.
 
cieje said:
the problem is with any device that uses the Prolific PL3507 firewire chipset. It's a known issue by them and microsoft. There have been some firmware updates from prolific but it doesn't work for all devices it seems, only some.

if you just google "Prolific PL-3507" you'll see tons and tons of forums etc talking about the problems. There's a continual "blog" about it here:

http://www.bustrace.com/delayedwrite/guestbook.php

here's a hotfix that m$ hasn't yet released that's supposed to fix it... supposedly
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885464

the main problem is that the chipset is still being produced and sold... despite these issues that have not been fixed. I lost 400g+ of data because of this problem. luckily I could recover with Ontrack, but it was still a pain. Now I only use my device as USB 2.0...

Another supposed way to fix it is to pull the firewire driver from the sp1 cabs and force sp2 to use that instead, but I haven't tried it yet.
Click to expand...


If the crappy chipset corrupts data during transfer, and you were able to run Ontrack software to recover some 400GB of data, then the data wasn't in fact corrupt. Either the data transferred or it didn't, no software is capable of filling in the blanks. Perhaps I read your post wrong.
 
davidlem said:
If the crappy chipset corrupts data during transfer, and you were able to run Ontrack software to recover some 400GB of data, then the data wasn't in fact corrupt. Either the data transferred or it didn't, no software is capable of filling in the blanks. Perhaps I read your post wrong.
Click to expand...

maybe you should read some of the links I posted. It in fact does corrupt data. Most notably it destroys the partition table etc - which isn't usually terrible in most cases, but in this one it was. I was unable to restore all that data btw, only maybe half or so - and even then some of it had 11.x file length etc (aka useless really). What would happen is I couldn't even mount or dismount the drive(s) eventually - after it happened once I'd go to usb2.0 and it'd still be unaccessible.

I was able to run ontrack not through the firewire or the usb - had to attach via ide. The data was "corrupt" in the way as it was unaccessible to the user through normal means. On one of the my drives, a larger one... ontrack was unable to discover and realocate the ntfs table - thus just seperating everything into folders based on filetype etc.
 
I did read the links, and I am familiar with this issue as I used to sell external enclosures and would occasionaly hear of the problems. We've since pulled that product to save ourselves and our customers the hassle.

Anyway, based on your post:
luckily I could recover with Ontrack, but it was still a pain.
Click to expand...

You were leading us to believe you recovered your data. There was no mention of a partial success.
 
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