News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

March 30, 2007

tips

Casing the joint

Posted Mar. 30, ’07, 6:46 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Tips

OWC case Out of all the aspects of upgrading my Powerbook’s hard drive, the last thing I expected to strike a chord with all of you was the use of an external hard drive case. That’s just one of those things that I take for granted that you do. In fact, I’ve never bought an external drive. I’ve bought an internal and the case to put it in, but never as a combined product. If you shop around (I use dealnews), you can not only make a drive that’s cheaper, but you can choose the hard drive manufacturer of choice.

As said in the comments of the other post, it’s also a great way to reuse drives from older machines, including old PCs. I’ll even let you in on my Leopard plans. I’m going to buy OWC’s two drive RAID case and a couple 500 GB drives for a really fast Firewire 800 1 TB drive for Time Machine backup. That should give me a good long history.

And speaking of OWC and external cases, they just released two new 2.5” cases. They both support SATA drives (like in your MacBook), but one is USB 2.0 only while the other is a combination USB 2.0/eSATA deal. Due to the current lack of eSATA on current Macs and my aversion to use of USB 2.0 for hard drives, I like the Firewire 800/USB 2.0 case for SATA drives.

Also, finally, I hate to get all broken record on you, but once you’ve slapped that old drive in a case, it makes a great backup drive. It’s ok that it’s smaller than your main drive (in most cases) because ideally you’ll want to keep a bunch of space free on your main drive and it’s ok if your backup sits a little tight.


1 Comments

Equinox said:

It sure got a hold on me. :D And now after wandering around the OWC store, I found something I like: The OWC Mercury Elite Pro -AL RAID. For now and later on with Time Machine too. :D. Great blog!

March 30, 2007 10:05 AM

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