[Machound]

I've been happy with my Rosewill RX30-U2FAB Firewire-800 drive, which I bought as a refurbished unit from ChiefValue.com for $77. New U2FAB enclosures are $100. It's really solid for the price and it uses the Oxford 922 chipset. It runs cool and quiet. I just placed an order for another Rosewill RX30-U2FA Firewire-400 drive with the Oxford 911 chipset.
Other good options are the MacAlly enclosures, of which I have the FW-400 and FW-800 models, for $45 and $80 respectively at NewEgg. Those also run cool and quiet. My only complaint is the FW-400 model doesn't power down for sleep. The FW-800 MacAlly drive is very good but not as quiet or as robust as the Rosewill enclosures. Also, I have no idea which chipset is used in the MacAlly drives... they don't tell that anywhere in the technical specs, nor is it easy to determine from System Profiler or anything else.

[Flavum]

My OWC experience was also related to a CPU upgrade. The Power Logix card I purchased had an incorrectly wired power cable that caused constant kernel panics. After 3 weeks, the cable was replaced with the correct one, but the card still gave flaky performance. By the time I threw in the proverbial towel, my 30 day warranty had expired, although OWC knew that I'd been dealing with a faulty unit for the first 3 weeks. They said it was now Power Logix's problem, although OWC had my money. They were unhelpful, unbending and unreasonable and have thus lost me as a customer. Tom

[Jim Galbraith]

We will be updating these tables on a regular basis. The LaCie D2 drive configuration that we were going to include is no longer for sale. We expect to be able to add a D2 drive to the desktop FireWire drives table in the near future.
JG

[Nobody]

I've noticed an error in "Portable FireWire hard drives" table.
Under "G-Technology's G-Drive mini", it says (as cons) "No USB 2.0; no FireWire 400 port", which is not true.
The product in question IS available in three variations: FW 800, COMBO FW 400 & USB 2.0, and USB 2.0 only.
The prices start from $119 for 40GB USB 2.0, and $149 for 40GB COMBO FW 400 & USB 2.0.

[cpoff]

We don't list every drive that every manufacturer makes, just the ones we've been able to review.
As far as we're concerned, the G-Drive mini FW (FW800) (which has no FW400 or USB) is a different product line than the G-Drive mini USB 2.0 or the G-Drive mini Combo. They all have different SKU numbers the FW800 is 90900x-xx the USB is 90902X-XX and the Combo is 90901x-xx.
We could expand the Other Capacities field to include other configurations, but the cons would remain for this specific drive model that we reviewed that doesn't have USB or FW400 ports.

[Nobody]

In reply to:

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although OWC had my money. They were unhelpful, unbending and unreasonable and have thus lost me as a customer.

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I recognise the pattern. Exactly my experience.
Seems they are happy to burn customers, as it is cheaper than servicing their faulty units.

[ernieg]

The admin says MacWorld doesn't review all drives. Naturally. But that still does not really explain the lack of ANY Seagate external hard drive review. I went back several years, both online and in the magazine itself. Not a single mention of a major brand. It appears that MacWorld is simply refusing to review Seagate, which makes me think there must be a reason.
I bought a Seagate external drive recently, because my G4 contained a Seagate internal, and now I'm concerned that it was a mistake. IS there a reason MacWorld doesn't review Seagate drives?
Thanks for your response.

[ernieg]

In reply to:

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Any comments from ye olde editors or anyone else with Seagate experience??

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I'll add to my previous post that the Seagate I bought (200GB) seems fast, boots Tiger, runs quiet, and has worked fine for the couple months I've had it.
Also, I was given a 40GB external drive 4 years ago that stopped working. Thinking it might be the box, I opened it up and found a Seagate Barracuda, which I dropped into my G4 as a backup disk. I've cloned my main disk to it every night, booted from it as a test . . . all with no problems, on a disk that has kicked around for 4 years or so.
The other thing that DOES seem to be missing from the review grid is some indication of reliability, Consumer Reports style. Speed and cost and so on are important, but we're all looking for a disk we can trust will be there when we most need it. How about it, testers? Isn't there a way to indicate expected longevity and reliability for the different brands?

[pairof9s]

It seems you slighted the MicroNet miniMate in your review of Mac mini external FireWire drives. You claim that its Cons are that it has modest capacity and a high cost/GB, yet you're comparing its 80GB model against the LaCie's 250GB and Newer Tech's 320GB. When comparing "apples to apples", the miniMate is better than the Newer Tech and close to LaCie's in the price/GB (e.g. - LaCie 80GB=$120, Newer Tech 80GB=$140, MicroNet 80GB=$135). This applies to all capacity models, too.
Considering the higher price for the Newer Tech and the lack of USB 2 (or FireWire, depending on the model you choose) ports on the LaCie, it would seem to me that the MicroNet is the better deal. Am I overlooking the obvious or have you?

[barrysharp]

I liked this report/review and would suggest a follow up one detailing the build-your-own FW/USB external HD. There are numerous vendors out there selling enclosures and similarly vendors selling bare HDs.
I compared your HD prices and test results with my recently purchased FW enclosure and a 300gig Seagate HD (7200rpm/8MB cache).
My enclosure is the Rosewill RX30-U2FAB 3.5" Firewire-800 drive, which I bought from NewEgg.com for $104 including S&H and the HD I installed in it was a 300gig Seagate ST3300831ARK running at 7200rpm with 8MB cache which I bought from Circuit City for $196 (Inc Sales Tax) with a 2x $40 mail-in rebate making total cost $116. The Rosewill enclosure is rock solid for the price and it uses the Oxford 922 chipset. As another poster has written - It runs cool and quiet. I've now bought three of these as the completely match my 2x 2.5GHz PowerMac G5 (the same one you ran your FW HD tests on).
The time for assembling the HD in the Rosewill took me all of 5 minutes and the unit worked immediately. I formatted it as a single HFS partition and it's been working flawlessly ever since.

So for me the price per GB came out to be $0.73 which beats all of your FW HDs listed. The closest one was the EZQuest which doesn't even sport a FW800 port at all.

I ran i/o tests as you did on my 2x 2.5GHz PM G5 (June 2004 model) that has 4.5gig RAM and runs 10.4.3 and came up with the following

1. Copy 1GB to Drive - 19.3 secs or 55.65 MB/sec (used Apple's mkfile program)
2. Duplicate 1GB on Drive - 19.4 secs (Finder duplicate took an amazing 16 secs)

Both of these test results surpassed all of the ones listed in your review by a HUGE margin.

Given my FW800 HD was built by buying a separate Enclosure HD for less money than what one pays for a complete assembly and that it's significantly better than what you've reported it would be a disservice to your MacWorld readers if you don't follow up your review with one describing the build your own FW800 device.
Might I suggest an article title of "FW400/800/USB2 for lowest cost and best performance".
Thanks... love reading the MacWorld. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

[tuomas]

Your article was good, though I missed some comparisation between usb2 and fw transfer speeds. I have read from various sources the the usb2 support provided by Apple doesn't perform as good as it should be. I was going to buy the Lacie P3 with usb2 port, but I heard that the fw400 version is twice as fast as the usb2 version on mac. Nevertheless I would like to use my drive also with Windows so I'm forced to buy a multi interface drive with much more money.
Any comments on that?

[lookerfw]

is there a reason you dont include companies like FireWire Depot at http://fwdepot.com in your product reviews?

I have been purchasing products from them since they first started over six years ago, and I will continue to do so based on their product selection, prices, expertise, and great support!

they have a wide selection of firewire, firewire/usb2, and sata enclosures, drives, bridgeboards, and everything else a FireWire user could ever want..

plus, as some have mentioned, not only do they offer complete out-of-the-box solutions (firewire, firewire/usb2 enclosures with drives installed), but they also offer all of the parts needed to create your own (like an 8 bay tower that you can load up with 8 x Seagate 500GB drives)

don't just focus on the big companies with deep pockets....

also, for those of you looking for un-biased speed tests and related information on FireWire, USB and SATA products, go to http://barefeats.com

[sgmorr]

I bought an Iomega Black Series Triple Interface 250 GB drive solely based on the MacWorld review. I'm having difficulty with one peculiar aspect of this drive. The power switch will not power off the Iomega as long as it is connect to my iMac via the Firewire cable. Of course, I unmount the drive icon after use but the drive will not power down at this point while the FW cable is connected. I have confirmed this behavior with two different people at Iomega tech support. This feature strikes me as a bug and is totally not workable for me in my present workspace set-up. Tech support at Maxtor, LaCie and OWC have all confirmed with me that their drives can be powered off while still connected to the Mac with the FW cable. I am trying to get Iomega to take their drive back.

[metrocon]

I've also got a Macally FW400 enclosure that doesn't spin down when the computer sleeps, and it's annoying. Does the Macally FW800 spin down? I'm looking for a FW800 enclosure and can't find much information on whether specific enclosures spin down/up as the computer sleeps/wakes. If anyone has information specifically on the OWC Mercury Elite Pro AL FW800 single drive enclosure, G-Drive FW800, or the Rosewill RX30-U2FAB enclosure it would be most appreciated. Is there a site that has this information for different enclosures?