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Recommendations for good external hard drive solutions?

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superboyac:
Hey!  If it meets mouser's approval, then I'm all in!  I just got a qoute from addonics on how much all this would be, not bad:

Ok so here are the parts you need to get.
 
For the inside you can use the following;
1. AESDCSISA at $89.50 each, this is for SATA hard drives and it will connect via a SATA cable to the mother board.
Now to use the enclosure externally you can use;
2. AAPAC12V-US at $19.00 power adapter.
3. AAUSBC-309 USB cable at $25.95 each.
4. AAFWC406 Firewire cable at $45.00 each.
 
You can use a SATA cable externally if you have the connection. Be careful though, you need the L shaped connection rather than the I shaped eSATA connection.
-----Original Message-----
Subject: RE: distinction between your products


Thanks for responding, let me explain in detail what I want:
 
I'd like to buy several SATA drives to swap in and out.  I want to put each of them in their own enclosures, and I'd like to be able to slide them in and out of the pc with the enclosure.  Inside the pc, hopefully I'd be able to use the actual SATA connection.  When removed from the pc, I'd like to externally connect to any computer using firewire AND USB.  Furthermore, and I don't know if this is possible, but I thought I've seen it somewhere, when one of these drives is removed and being used externally, would it be possible to still connect with SATA and not usb/firewire?  i think I've seen where a SATA is coming out of the back of the PC to connect an external drive directly to it, but I may be mistaken.  So that is basically it, I appreciate your help.

--- End quote ---

mouser:
that email sounds like i would not buy from them.
they sound like they are selling you stuff you dont need at high prices.

if you are a bit more adventurous, you can build your own system by buying enclosure+racks+harddrives directly instead of in some super kit.

when you buy an enclosure it comes with a power adapter (just a standard plug in the cases i've seen), and if someone tried to charge me $26 for a usb cable or $45 for a firewire cable, i'd show them the underside of my boot  >:(

[however, i do recognize that their is some value in having a complete tested kit]

mouser:
just make sure you get an enclosure that will fit a rack.
normally that means a 5.25 enclosure with an "open face" (ie one suitable for mounting a cd drive).

XMinus1:
OK well I'll probably get chewed out for this but I'm not actually going to answer your question:  instead, I'll respond to a statement you made in the intial post of this thread about External HDDs like Maxtor's One Touch.  I have an External 160 GByte Seagate (apparently the 160GByte is no longer available).  It's been a champ:  I've had it for perhaps 2.5-3 years.  About 2 years ago it fell 3-4 feet onto a tile floor:  it's still going two years later (and it gets a lot of use).  I'm very impressed with it, although I've read customer complaints about some of the higher-capacity units, and I have a co-worker that had one fail.

I do have a bit of experience with hdd chassis.  A few years ago I bouoght a bunch of cheap ($15-20?) chassis from a local PC shop and installed all of my HDDs in them.  That didn't work out very well:  each had a fan for cooling, but it was poor quality, and I began to have thermal issues, and other problems.  I went back to the old way, and have stayed there ever since.  I now have a 4GByte Flash Drive (actually it's one of those iMation microdrive devices that looks like a lock:  great design and a great performer so far, after a month's use) so data portabilty is no longer an issue for me.  I'm sure I had problems woth the swappable chassis because I cheaped out:  I got what I paid for.

mouser:
this might seem contradictory but i also think xminus1's advice is quite good.  getting one of these self-contained (one-touch style) external hds which costs a little bit more can be a very good decision if you don't have plans to do a lot of swapping, etc.  i have no hesitation recommending such a solution for those that want an external backup drive but don't feel the need to do tons of rack-based swapping.

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