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Things to do with a removable FireWire drive enclosure System
This does not really fit anywhere in your categories but I have found it incredibly useful. By getting an external 5¼" Firewire box that's capable of taking an IDE CD ROM, and fitting a removable drive sled system to it, I am now able to:
  1. Have a perfect system for diagnostics, by simply removing the drive from another machine, dropping it into a carrier, and throwing it in the FW enclosure. After powering it up, I can now run all of my utilities on that drive, with no need to reboot!

  2. Have multiple drives that I can swap in/out. I use one drive for video editing, another for an OS9/OSX boot drive, another where I "play" with OSX, experimenting with X11 and trying some of these hints on a system I can afford to scrap, etc.
All of this takes about 30 second to swap. I understand that OS X should also cope with an XP drive, but I have yet to test this. I can make a backup of the drive onto a CD/DVD and not have to worry about software and drivers, as they are all on my machine which is kept up to date.

This idea is not mine, I 'stole' it from a friend David Chisholm who is an Apple service Tech, I owe him a ton of favours for this.
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Things to do with a removable FireWire drive enclosure
Authored by: mayodreams on Mar 10, '03 11:31:29AM

I bought a 40gig WD HD for my G4 from a friend and he had put 30gigs of mp3's on it for me. I put it in my PC and copied off what I wanted and took it out and was going to format it on the Mac. Much to my surprise, once in the Mac, the drive mounted perfectly and I could read and write to it without incident. It was formatted with FAT32 and I am pretty sure NTFS isn't support in OSX, but it may very well be.



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Things to do with a removable FireWire drive enclosure
Authored by: clmensch on Mar 10, '03 01:04:07PM

Yes, the NTFS filesystem not supported on any other OS than Windows, and it doesn't look like it will EVER be supported. In addition, you have to be very careful when using a FAT32 firewire drive between Windows and OSX. If you do not properly dismount the drive in Windows (i.e. simply unplug it), the drive will never mount on OSX again until you reformat it. You might be able to repair it without reformatting it, but I'm not sure. I know this from experience...trust me, it's ugly. Thanks, Microsoft!


---

"I drank WHAT?" -Socrates



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Things to do with a removable FireWire drive enclosure
Authored by: raider on Mar 11, '03 11:46:47AM
Actually, there is open source support for NTFS under several OSs:

Linux

Other OSs

Heck, to some extent - NTFS is workable under just about any OS you can find...

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Things to do with a removable FireWire drive enclosure
Authored by: PhilMathon on Apr 01, '04 04:11:03AM

OSX 10.3 can now read NTFS drives (New Technology File System) for this Micro$oft format.

Secondly, under Window$ you have the option (in Computer Management) to disable the disc cache which will let you safely unplug a FW or USB drive without first ejecting it.

Philippe



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Things to do with a removable FireWire drive enclosure
Authored by: nox on Mar 10, '03 07:13:03PM

I bought a Yamaha F1 IDE drive and used an old QueFire 12x Firewire
CDR Shell for it , that was laying waround the office. I purchased the
drive for 90 bux , normally this drive in Firewire would cost me 300. I did
have to purchase the Etch Software for like 20 bux for the DISCT@2
feature Yamaha F1 Drives , I already owned Toast , which supports this
drive with the 5.2 Update.



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Things to do with a removable FireWire drive enclosure
Authored by: xStep on Mar 11, '03 03:48:45AM

This is one of the things I dislike about the Mac tower enclosures. Without major surgery, swapping drives this easily isn't possible like my Intel hardware. I can't bring my self to cutting up my dual 867.

Firewire & USB does have one big advantage. You don't have to shut down the OS to swap drives.



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Things to do with a removable FireWire drive enclosure
Authored by: bogdescu on Mar 12, '03 11:28:19PM

In fact there is a specialized "dock" made by wiebetech.com that offers a convenient albeit pricy way to do this. (am not affiliated with them).
See barefeats.com for tests.



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Things to do with a removable FireWire drive enclosure
Authored by: krishna on May 15, '03 04:27:03PM

Great suggestion, but with nice big hard drives coming out, any recommendations for enclosure and sled manufacturers that support drives bigger than 128GiB? The sleds I've priced are $12; not bad, but sure would be nice if I could get a bunch of them cheaper than that.

Also, not all 5 1/4'' enclosures easily accommodate (physical dimensions-wise) a sled instead of a cd-rom. In particular, those all-silvery plastic ones that you see *so* many of, don't, and the one I used (not one of those types) I had to smush the sled bay in, compressing some wires. It works, but not comfortably.

A combo 5 1/4'' enclosure that has usb 2.0 and firewire, and supports >128GiB drives, with sleds, would solve so many portable storage solution problems at once.



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