External Hard Drive Enclosures?

AdmiralWeirdbeard wonders: "I've been looking to put together an external hard drive for use with my Mac Mini. Obviously, the built-in storage is not sufficient. However, I know nothing about what makes an external enclosure good or bad, and have found nothing but mixed reviews for even the best rated enclosures on Newegg and Amazon. Every model seems to have at least one person complaining of an enclosure that fried the drive through overheating. The literature I've read seems to focus on the pros and cons of the various enclosures for big (50+gb) weekly or even daily system backups. I dont need anything for regular backups, but rather just for storage of my music, movies, and other miscellaneous data. Any ideas on the pros and cons of fan/fanless, construction materials, and different brands out there?"

Comments

External MacMini Drives

[spiralscratch]

There are a number of drives available that are specifically designed to sit perfectly under the Mini itself and feature the same basic color/design/etc. Most also feature USB2 and Firewire hubs. I think LaCie and Other World Computing have models, as well as a couple other manufacturers.

Try skimming MacWorld, Macintouch, XLR8yourmac, etc. for reviews.

I believe that the general consensus is that drives with an Oxford USB/firewire to IDE bridge are best, though I've not had the opportunity to verify this myself.

Re:Why do USB drives fail under linux?

[NotoriousQ]

I have seen it. It is a very curious problem. Linux, as far as I know, still sees the device, but the device stops responding. I think what happens is that linux feeds them data in a way that they should handle, but do not, due to bugs. And when they crash, linux does not reset them. The drives work in windows because those bugs have been found by testing done by manufacturer.

At least this is what I think is happening. Any kdev willing to be more helpful?

There is a similar problem with firewire, where, for some reason, the io gets reordered wrong and it confuses the drive. There is an option for serializing IO that works like a charm. My external firewire drive has an uptime of a few months now.