[wplug] OT - word of warning on Maxtor 250GB drives

[Vanco, Don]

> Does anyone have a recommendation for good USB 2.0 IDE hard
> drive enclosures? 
	I have tried 4 different brands to this point ranging in price
from $19 to $49, and sadly they're all rather crap.  They all use a
different (dare I say proprietary) type of power connector, and they all
likely have only marginal power to the drives.  Some of them have had
fans (one of which died and was pulling the PSU down), some of them go
together with incredibly small screws (thank G they come with a special
screwdriver, just don't lose it) and some are fastenerless (clamshell
case that has a snap-in border that holds the halves together - best
design yet).  Of course these things might not matter to those that are
going to stuff a drive in it and forget it.

	Sadly more expensive has not proven to be better, and cheap has
not proven to be worse.

	The best one I've seen so far is from Seagate (unfortunately it
has a Seagate drive in it), the only downside being that it has all
kinds of neon and LEDs in it, and if I leave on it in the living room
whilst compiling it literally lights up the entire house.  I suppose I
could crack it open and pull the wires....

	I'm not going to buy another one on-line sight unseen - I'd
suggest you consider a trip to the local big-box retailer and look at
what they have and decide if it's right for you.  I'll do that, then
look on-line to see if it's cheaper (but MicroCenter seems to have good
pricing lately, and then there's instant gratification factor to
consider).

	As I stated earlier I'm now using little $9 adapters that
connect right to the IDE port and the drives are being powered buy an
old PSU.  It's not pretty, but it has plenty of current at the ready,
and gives me the ability to add fans - which I'm gonna do.

This is the fastenerless one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817145314
Pros: seems to be about the best PSU; uses a standard C13 computer cord;
fan cooled; includes a decent cable
Cons: Size; fan is a bit loud
HOWEVER - I see in some reviews that they changed chipsets in this thing
and it's now crap :(

This is the one with the incredibly small screws:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817145125
Pros: size
Cons: runs very hot (vents almost on-existent); I have reason to believe
the PSU is inadequate for larger drives




Zach -
	Consider a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card - they can be had for cheap.
I've got one just to add the extra ports and it's proven to be great.
Failing that - even a slow backup at USB 1 speeds is better than no
backup at all. Once you do the "major" "back-it-all up" backup the
incrementals will take much less time / space.


Don


> 
> On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Zach wrote:
> 
> > On 2/15/06, Patrick Wagstrom <pwagstro at andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
> > > 
> > > Zach,
> > > 
> > > You might want to consider a LinkSys NSLU2.  It's a little network
> > > device that you attach USB2.0 hard disks to.  Provides samba file
> > > sharing, but because it runs Linux, you can use NFS and install
> > > backup daemons on it. 
> > > 
> > > For my computer, I basically do all my backups over the network
> > > because I've got 100Mbit ethernet but only USB 1.1 on board.
> > 
> > Thanks for the suggestion Patrick. How much does that device cost?
> > Does it come with wireless security features?
> > 
> > Zach
> > 
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