External drives?

[mamado]

Hello, I am planning on buying an external drive, does any one has experience with external drives?

I am thinking of:
Px-712UF (tooo expensive)
Sony DRX 700 (looks good, but I haven't seen many reviews on Sony, is any one using it)


Will buying an internal drive and an external enclosure be the same???

[hoxlund]

it would be the exact same, you normally save tons of money by buying internal and putting in external case

[Halc]

Be advised that all those external burners use USB and IEEE1394 to IDE bridge chips.

There are differences between reliability and speed of those chipsets.

As to which one is the best, I'm partial to Oxford chipsets on the IEEE1394 (i.e. firewire) side, but have no great preference on the Hi-Speed USB (i.e. usb 2.0) front.

[hoxlund]

ive got an oxford chipset usb2 enclosure, using a 160gb hard drive in it

works great

i used to use my plextor premium in it, that too worked great

[minchin]

I would stay away from USB2 boxes if you go beyond 8X burners. I actually am using NEC2510A in a cheapo USB2 external box that are being sold almost everywhere.... using ALI chip. Works fine...

I was using it with a HD (250GB, 7200RPM Maxtor) and the performance drop was too large (forgot the exact number, but in the neighbourhood of 1/3 the transfer rate)... where as Firewire 1394a based on Oxford, has about 1/2 the bandwidth compare to pure PATA.....

Time to get some 1394b boxes? I have a old SCSI enclosue that I am thinking of converting to a 1394b enclosure by replacing the bridge board....

Min

[mamado]

Thank you all for your valuable comments, I think I will start looking for an internal one now.

Hope to find a good one.

[Halc]

minchin,

Oxford 911 and 922 chipset are not the culprit. It's probably your IEEE1394 controller implementation that is limiting the bandwidth.

In all the Oxford firewire/IDE bridge chipset reviews I've seen the sustained read/write is almost at the level of parallel ATA / IDE throughput.

Then again, using a bad implementation of the Via firewire controller chipset may cut those numbers in half...