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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?"
As an iMac G5 user:
:)
I have a MacAlly firewire HDD enclosure it works great. If you Mini has firewire, stick with Wirewire. This one also has USB. I've yet to try the USB. Check the chipset the board uses inside the Oxford 911 firewire is the best firewire (according to reviews, I've yet to test it). Again, IMO the MacAlly is superb. I also have one of their 5 1/4" firewire enclosures for a DVD burner. Works great.
One brand I would avoid though: Bytecc. I have one of their USB enclosures. It rarely, if ever, mounts in OSX. It wasn't such a problem in XP though. I don't know if the fault is with the chipset (its a VIA, surprised?!) or with Apple supporting the chipset. Overall, though the transfer rate (with the same drive) is much slower than the MacAlly.
If you want a cool looking one, there is a firewire enclosure that looks like a mini-G5 aluminum tower. I'd have bought one but the fees to import into Canada would have been a bit high.
As an aside, when are SATA enclosures going to be more readily avaialble. The only ones out now have a premium price attached to it.
There. Now digest all the information. I always type more than I need to!
If you get a drive cage made of aluminum, there is no need for a noise-making and dust-sucking fan.
How ya like dat?
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.
I purchased a very inexpensive Vantec Nexstar USB2.0/Firewire enclosure, and have been very impressed. The plastic of the enclosure feels cheap, however it comes with rubber HD mounts so that you isolate any drive vibrations from the desk/ground.
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For any enclosure, the two things to look for are: type of bridge i.e. Oxford900/911/922, and whether there is an integrated fan.
The Oxford900 is the legacy chip, do not buy one. The Oxford911 is compatible with large HDs and the 922 is Firewire800. I use my enclosure for backup so heat was not an issue, however if you plan on using the drive full time, or as a boot drive, look into a more expensive enclosure that comes with a fan.
If you want to keep with the Mac Mini styling and have extra $$ to burn, consider these: http://www.123macmini.com/accessories/guide/enclo
otherwise the Vantecs are fine: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Sub
Yawn.
Newertech has a great one called the miniStack. USB 2.0 or Firewire, and has hubs for both built-in. It's available as a bare case or with a drive preinstalled.
One of the things that always strikes me about a lot of USB hard disk enclosures is how tiny they are and how hot disks run when in them. Try and get one with a small fan in the back. It will move a bit of air and help your disk to last longer. If you can't get one with a fan and portability isn't an issue, try and get a 5.25" one and a couple of mounting brackets for a 3.5" disk. The extra room will mean the disk runs slightly cooler. The 5.25" ones tend to have removable front panels too, so you can stick in a grille with a filter instead of a blank panel to improve ventilation.
If you're using it with your Mac Mini, I'd suggest that having another brick to plug into the wall isn't as big of an issue than if you were using it with your Powerbook or something. Bus powered enclusures won't power a lot of bigger disks - the USB spec doesn't provide for more than about 2.5W on the whole bus, and you lose a bit in hubs and controllers as well so there's not much left to power the disk. FireWire can provide a bit more power, and I've seen bus-powered FireWire enclosures that work quite well (if you have the larger, powered, FireWire socket on the Mac Mini rather than the mini, non-powered, one).
Make sure the enclosure is USB2 capable, and some come with FireWire as well. The dual support ones (in my experience) are more reliable and better built. FireWire is reportedly a bit faster than USB2 for sustained transfer rates, but I have never been able to demonstrate that.
Don't buy a bay with a disk in it. You pay a fortune for them compared to buying a good bay and a disk separately. Seagate and Maxtor both have them. Sure, they work and are good for people who can't use a screwdriver but you pay a premium for some guy in Taiwan to use his screwdriver instead.
I drink to make other people interesting!
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.
badness 10000
I have a 'hard drive enclosure' here that you connect to simply by plugging in an ethernet jack. It has provisions for 12 hotswap SCSI drives and can be configured for hardware RAID.
It's called an IBM PC Server 704, and it also has 4 pentium pro processors and some other stuff. The 'firmware' in it that provides access to it's storage to the machine 'expanded' by plugging into it is NetBSD.
It's also the size of a conventional two-drawer file cabinet. You could install it on a platform with casters and call it portable. I suppose.
resigned
I've seen this USB bug as well. The solution is to set CONFIG_SCSI_DEBUG_QUEUES=y ("Enable extra checks in new queuing code" under "SCSI Support" in the 2.4 series).
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
A few features I was looking for (and found):
If you want more info, I found:
- A little flyer (.pdf) from AMS.
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A nice video review (have to click a few things to get to it).
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And a review with a bunch of pictures.
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I got mine from Directron ($59, cheaper to ship to AK), but it's also at NewEgg ($54 + s/h).
My only complaint, it needs to be pretty exposed (i.e. to open air) to stay _cool_. I recently stuck mine in a cramped spot above a bunch of transformers, so I rigged up a case fan a few inches underneath (12V fan running off 5V to stay quiet) and it's cool to the touch again!