Building external firewire drives

[invisibledan]

I'm looking to buy a couple of external firewire drives, preferably fw800 with usb as well but looking at tailor made ones they are a) fucking expensive and b) fucking unreliable.
I know that drives are reliable until they arent, but it seems (according to the reviews I've been reading) internal drives tend to fair a bit better for some reason...I suppose they just sling any old shit in the external ones.
Anyway, I'd like to buy 2 identical enclosures, but have two different brand but same spec. drives in them. For the drives I think I'll be getting a Seagate and a Hitachi 500gb 7200rpm, but I'm unsure about the enclosures.
I'm inclined to think It'd be best to get fan cooling as theres a chance (very slight though) they might end up in a club, but other than that I'm at a loss.
Any ideas anyone???
ta.x

oh, mac osx if that makes any difference

[love_tempo]

the reliability is also due to shitey power supples, bad cooling and ventiliation, intermittent use etc...

one decent option would be to build a toaster size micro pc and use it as a NAS. Otherwise, I've use Lacie ones and not had too much trouble.

Also, Western Digitals new MyBook drives look good. Given that a major drive manufacturer is attaching their name and branding to it, should be decent. They make good drives too and surely will use their own.

[love_tempo]

oh and we use maxtor onetouch II at work and they are very solid and include a fan. prolly more reliable than the western digitals.

[ckpqerjwrpwp]

Seagate do an enclosure too now. Their drives are normally good so probably worth checking out.

I had a FW800 Lacie die and I put the drive in a dirt cheap FW400 enclosure costing about £15... has worked fine for a year so far...

[Loz]

Maxtor drives have a good habit of just dieing without warning, though, so I'd steer clear of those.

The MyBook is good, but so expensive for what it is.

[invisibledan]

I was going to order a WD My Book but when i was doing a search to find the cheapest i found this
It was the amount of comments that put me off

[Yer_Maw]

ive been searching for network attatched storage and cnet has some good roundups:

reviews.cnet.com/

although ive never had any problems with the cheap caddy i bought and shoved an old hd in.

[ckpqerjwrpwp]

You won't find a drive out there in this price range without a scare story... however some like the Lacies have a lot more than others.

Yer Maw have you been looking into OSX NAS? I started looking into it half-heartedly a while ago and never got anywhere... after I found that the Buffalo RAID systems which have a good reputation.. are apparently not so good with OSX.

[Yer_Maw]

the fastest/best price one i could find was ximeta netdisk portable or smartdisk netdisk. I have the feeling they are the same drive but different branding, but im still looking into it as they are hard to come by and i dont really understand why they are so much faster. i think its a hack rather than an embedded linux but im still looking into it.

the cnet site compares loads of them by speed, hp and iomega seem the best but they arnt cheap. the mybook is way down.

[kay101011]

i got a mybook pro 500 and i didn't found it was expensive
works nice too