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Non-RAID Multi-IDE HD Firewire Enclosures?
Chris Jones asks: "I am finding that with all the large IDE harddrives becoming so cheap lately, I now have 4-5 nice sized IDE drives lying around my home office. Does anyone know of firewire enclosures that support multiple harddrives and are NOT RAID? RAID seems to quadruple the cost of enclosures... I just want a box with a power supply that can handle 4 IDE drives as well as the 4 Oxford 911 firewire bridge boards. On a different note, does anyone know if the Oxford 911 bridge board supports master and slave drives? If it does, then I would only need two boards for my 4 IDE drives, so if someone currently makes something like this, please point me to them! I would expect to pay $35 per Oxford board, $50 for the power supply and $50 for the enclosure... $15 for a cooling fan Does this sound reasonable?"
Maybe it's not the solution you want to hear, but you could always pick up some old AT case and power supply and use that.. Secondhand you could probably get it for about $5. Even new, it wouldn't be very expensive.
~GoRK
I got my FW to IDE bridgeboard here. Not exactly the $35/board you're looking for, but it does indeed do master/slave so you'd only need two. It works great under Linux (RH8.0) and is fine under XP. The only problem that I have is that with XP, I can't unmount the devices so there is no way for me to do a hot-unplug of the device. Not a huge issue, but it's kind of annoying.
Just so you're aware, one firewire bus can only do 400Mbps. You might want more than 100Mbps (~12MB/s) per drive. :)
:)
Personally, I'd go with buying an empty drive chassis with 5.25" drive bays.. then create a firewire backplane and use those ide drive caddies for holding the disks.
The only question is how many firewire controllers do you wish to have ?
CalOptic makes their own IDE to 1394b adapters and enclosures using the Oxford chipset.
http://www.caloptic.com
OK, I know this is offtopic, and will probably be modded down as offtopic or flamebait, but it's still worth the time of putting out a word of warning (and bad reference) to those who obviously deserve it.
B Gear.comt wo.com ... and probably others.
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Normally I wouldn't even think of posting anything quite this strongly put, but if you do business with Florida Computers, or it's web portal aliases, from my (and others' experiences), you could experience some of the poorest business practices I've personally witnessed yet.
Their online portals span several domains, some of which are:
APDrives.com
QualityCables.com
USBMax.com
US
FloridaComputers.com
CoolDrives.com
u
firewiremax.com
First, do yourself a favor and visit the Clearwater Better Business Bureau and check their record -
http://www.clearwater.bbb.org/commonreport.html
Florida Computers is the "parent" company of all of those web portals, with the same owners, shipped from the same place, with the same customer service and support.
Secondly, check out an extremely unprofessional rant by Rad Rozycki directed at a specific (named) customer over a service complaint at APDrives.com -
http://www.apdrives.com/apdrives/press-news.htm
Makes you wonder about the overall calibre of company you're ordering from when they publically post a personal rebuttal to a specific person, with personalized information as well, onto the PRESS section of their website. Sorry, but it's wholly inappropriate in any venue or circumstance.
Lastly, check out a couple Googled references on Mr. Royzcki -
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=rad+rozycki&h
and
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=rad+rozycki&h
Of course, all of the above information came too late for me to avoid trouble.
I personally had a run-in with them a year ago over a FireWire enclosure that was utterly DOA, zero response via email (support@utwo.com actually bounced - and was eventually fixed after I pointed it out), and of course the problem was with my hardware (of which it didn't work on three different systems, three different 1394 cards, three different cables, and three different OS's), NOT with their product - which incidentally they claimed to personally on site 100% test every single product they sell before shipment. Riiiiiight, everyone pulls their product out of the shrinkwrap, plugs it in, tests it, re-shrinkwraps it, and then ships it out.
It was eventually returned for replacement and instead it was considered a "return" and was charged 15% restocking fee. On defective merchandise!!! Can you say fraud?
He has positively the WORST customer relations and communications skills I have ever experienced when doing business with someone. Downright childish and accusatory in all respects, with no help whatsoever in resolving the matter and nothing but exaggerations, lies, and innuendo in response to my communications.
Do yourself a favor and avoid them AT ALL COST. I needed an enclosure fast, and I ended up ordering a Pyro enclosure from CDW. Even though it wasn't the cheapest one I could have gotten, I know CDW would have at least stood behind the product and helped resolve any warranty issues, not try to stand ON the customer like Mr. Rozycki does. And ultimately the CDW approach would have been cheaper as it turned out.
Brad