What to look for in a Hard Drive Enclosure?

[jprupas]

I need to buy 3 hard drive enclosures to link to my Mac Book Pro.

What options, features, stats, should I look for?

Are there any that are more quiet than others.

Willing to spend about $50 a piece.

Thanks

[jprupas]

Decided to get two of CompUsa's firewire enclosures for $60 a piece and a 500 gb maxtor drive for one of them. Works well for the Mac Book pro so far. Allows you to capture DV firewire video while connected and daisy chain them together.

[fryke]

I'd generally say that the cheapest enclosures are the best. (Because reports about external drive enclosures vary, anyway, and you might buy a good or a bad one, whatever users say...) Yet, I've so far only bought "complete" drives (all Maxtor). I've got four external drives now. The main problem is: They tend to be full after a while. I should be able to buy a 10 TB drive now. It'd last me a while.

[jprupas]

4 drives? wow

Ya I agree they seem to fill up fast. I have about 740 gb total. I have 3 other drives out of the enclosures that I use to back those up incase they fail.

The problem is a shoot too many photos and have little time to edit out the bad ones so I just save them all. You never know when clients need another angle or exposure. And the video work I do keeps half the drive full until I am done with each project. The new 500 should last me a while.