Quote:
Originally Posted by Senna4ever
I wouldn't get one of those Western Digital HD's, personally. I now buy good HD's and put them in a decent enclosure, like WiebeTech's.
http://www.wiebetech.com/home.php |
My biggest concern with buying a drive and putting it into an enclosure is that a lot of the cheaper enclosures have crap USB chipsets in them. Compound that with most drives requirements for more than 500mA of power and it's a recipe for data corruption on the drive.
Mind you, not all enclosures fall into that category. The Wiebetech ones look like they come with a power adapter which alleviates the power draw issue (but means one more item to carry around with the drive which may be an inconvenience) There's also other brands (I think Macally is one that is geared towards Macs in general) that are pretty decent as well.
Most manufacturers try to get around that by giving a Y cable that uses 2 USB ports to give you 1A of power. However, I frequently see people only plug in one of the connectors and wonder why the machine doesn't detect the drive. At least with the pre-packaged drive + enclosures (like the WD or Seagate), it's been engineered and tested to work flawlessly with the chipset and a single USB connection. With buying your own enclosure and drive, you'll need to do research into drives and enclosures first otherwise you'll end up with a drive that's unreliable and frustrating to use - not to mention possible data loss.
Just my 2c on buying external enclosures...