Firewire Enclosures

[XHipHop]

What's a good enclosure for recording on a mac. I'd like to be able to swap drives pretty easily.
Thanks!

[littledog]

While more expensive, I find the warranties and customer support make Glyph drives an arttractive option.

If you ever should have a drive filled with valuable data crash on you, and didn't have it all backed up, you would be very glad you had Glyph's free data recovery service. NO other manufacturer will do that. They might replace the drive, but will do nothing about your data except recommend a data recovery service that will cost you $2000-$4000!!! (Ouch!)

[MJohnson]

http://www.granitedigital.com

makes firewire enclosures that hot swap and have LCD screens for performance and diagnostic info.

[Rab]

These look very interesting - even just the bridge & LCD kit. Have you actually used these for heavy audio work? Given most firewire drives seem to provide sustained transfer @25MBps, is the claimed 40MBps genuine? Curious...

[cajonezzz]

Originally posted by Rab
These look very interesting - even just the bridge & LCD kit. Have you actually used these for heavy audio work? Given most firewire drives seem to provide sustained transfer @25MBps, is the claimed 40MBps genuine? Curious...

I've got the granite digital hot swaps.....and while I still prefer to work off the scsi drives on the rig, we have used the firewire drives with good results. We regularly archive and sneakernet between different studios with no problems.

[Rab]

Originally posted by cajonezzz
while I still prefer to work off the scsi drives on the rig

Is this because you're seeing a significant performance/reliability advantage or maybe you have some kind of established Kingston removable system going in your facility? It seems the only time I'm asked to put in big SCSI drive systems with new rigs these days is for high track count hidef recording. Otherwise it's a couple of decent internal IDE's with desktop firewire drives for transferring (even long-term archiving as they're so cheap cf. SCSI).

[cajonezzz]

Originally posted by Rab
Is this because you're seeing a significant performance/reliability advantage or maybe you have some kind of established Kingston removable system going in your facility?

I wouldn't say significant .....but in some cases I've noticed a little more finger wagging when recording to the firewire drives.
we spent a ridiculous amount of money on a Digi firewire 80 as well...and had some problems with it (I think firewire for us in general has been up and down, but thats probably because we're on an early g4, we've had 3 different drives come up as unrecognizeable....)

And yes, we do have quite a fewremoveable scsi drives as well that have been rock solid.

the new rooms computer, a dual 867, will have two large internal drives and archive to firewire. We'll relegate the scsi drives to the other room.