Ye olde tale of the FireWire enclosure ...

Cat

Cat

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Hear ye, hear ye!

After long pilgrimage in the computer shoppes of the world I finally found the mythical firewire enclosure to house the drives of my defunct PC.

I brought it home and prayed the gods of hardware assembly for their assistance. After offering the blood of my knuckels, the gods bestowed on me the wisdom of assembly. Aye, I almost sacrificed an eye to the god of screwdrivers before I was able to tame the beast.

In the darkness of the Desk Dungeons I battled the snakelike cables to free my olde PC, then I ripped it apart with great prowess and stuffed the drive in the enclosure. Long I wrested with tiny screws until I screwed them!

I gave thanks and asked the gods of connectivity and data transfer to hallow my Firewire cable. Then I performed the Rituals of Connection, lighting 1394 candles, and plugged the cables in.

I excorcised the devil that is windows from it and used the Power of my Book to turn it to the light. The drive hummed softly in its new cradle and was content to serve me for the many years to come, despite the dead of its former host.

... and hence it came to pass that I am now bestowed with the gift and blessing that is Backup.
 
Congratulations!
I did the same thing a few months ago, and use mine as a scratch-disk for video editing.
Also, nice religion. (goes off to celebrate Winter Solstice in Southern Hemisphere)
 
My enclosure is Aluminium colored, the brand is "Made in China" :D
AFAIK the chipsets in these things are all more or less the same, and you pay a premium for fancy enclosures and brands. I don't need that. This one was € 59,- and it is all I need. Works perfectly.

I suspect, as it isn't clearly stated anywhere, that it is just Firewire 400, instead of 800. So perhaps it would be too slow for some kinds of real-time data transfer, but I'll make some experiments, like playing games from it, booting, music etc.

What would be the best way to test the transfer speeds? It's like 1 GB a minute ... but that's quite rough and depends heavily on the number of files (more files = slower).
 
Well the best benchmark is the "use it how you use it" test. If you watch MPEG-4 video off your hard drive, do that for a while and see if it skips or jitters. If you convert ripped CD Audio tracks to FLAC or OGG Vorbis format a lot, do a few dozen and see if it's quick. If you only edit plain text files, then don't worry -- anything faster than a floppy disk will do just fine. :)
 
A couple years ago I bought an enclosure and then built two identical "docking stations" (one for home and work). They're like two big, ugly iPod docks. Very functional though, I just drop in a new drive for a given project and use the enclosure like a removable media cartridge. Very cool.

With drives being so cheap nowadays, I just buy a new hard drive for each client (at least the clients that have enough files, usually video). That way I never have to recapture again. Super efficient.
 
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