Oxford 911 External Enclosure, what should I get?

Highway of Life

Highway of Life

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I'm in need of some new External Firewire hard drives.
The DAWMac guys pointed me to the External drives that contain the Oxford 911 chipset, and get a Seagate to go inside.
I found some pretty good deals on the Seagate, but I have been unable to find a good enclosure, the one that I was looking at was the Bytecc (ME-320F).
However, it does not appear that this drive is Mac OS X compatable, only OS 8.6 and above.
Is this correct information?

What would be a good cost-effective Firewire enclosure to get that has the Oxford 911 chipset?

Thanks in advance,
- Highway
 
I have that exact same enclosure (The Bytecc ME320-F) and it works flawlessly with Mac OS X and an IBM 80GB hard drive inside (soon to be upgraded to a Western Digital 250GB jumbo buffer).

I love it the most because it's got a cooling fan inside for adequate cooling during long sessions -- something the smaller, more compact enclosures do not offer.

For reference, the 'X' in Mac OS X is a roman numeral -- it's "Mac oh ess ten"... ten is higher than 8.6, so "8.6 and above" includes Mac OS X. For hardware this usually works out just fine... if you come across SOFTWARE, however, that mentions 8.6 and above, it most likely won't work unless it specifically mentions Mac OS X compatibility.

The Bytecc enclosure is fully compatible with Mac OS X.
 
Thanks, that helps a lot.
What is the difference between the ME320-F and the ME320? The ME320 is about a dozen bucks cheaper, and I have yet to find out exactly why.

- Highway
 
One other great thing about this enclosure (well, two actually) is that it's easily disassembled (no tools required except for mounting the drive) so switching drives is quick, plus it accepts 5 1/2" sized drives -- making it really simple to pop a DVD/CD-RW drive in there for a while.

I've had to do that twice now, and it was a lot simpler than disconnecting my computer, pulling it out (it's heavy!), using tools to remove the drive, removing the faceplate, screw everything back together, plug it all in (how many cords can a computer have?!), and go... instead, pop open FireWire case, swap drives with 4 screws, close, connect and go. Plus it's a lot lighter than the computer... ;)
 
I had to fix a Mac once that had damaged drives, so I used one of these Bytecc enclosures, and had to disassemble it to swap out the 3 drives, and hooked it up to my Powerbook to recover the data from the drives. It was quite easy to disassemble as you said. I'm thinking of getting a handful of seagate drives, and using this enclosure to swap them out, since I won't need the drives often.

BTW, I had read an article on the ME-320f which said they were not OS X compatable, which is what confused me since I had remembered using one on a Panther drive.
I ordered the enclosure today, it was about $45 with the shipping, not too bad.
Thanks for your help.
 
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