I bought an "open" firewire box from OWC for $55 at a fire sale. It is designed for CD drives. It is unbelievably wonderful.
The question is: what is my limiting factor in selecting a device to be housed in this unit insofar as the Mac is concerned? The enclosure uses the Oxford-911 chipset for Firewire (which I hear is good, for use with Macs).
Its nice reasonably solid plastic cover just pops open and I can put inside my DVD burner or a big HD and cart it around. I got a couple of 160GB maxtor drives but no ATA133 busses to put them on, but guess what? this box sees the whole drive.
I can hook up the 160 GB maxtor to my Ti-Book and download a mongo movie from the recorder into one of the firewire ports in the back--with the other port going to the Ti-Book (which only has one port). And then after the 20-30GB movie is in, I can render it with the Ti-Book. When the rendering is done, I can transfer the smaller rendered movie file to the Ti-Book, swap in the DVD burner and burn a DVD!!! Or plug the drive into the G3 and burn some video CDs on my fast CD burner.
I can then also take my DVD burner around the neighborhood and do good deeds with it, because as you know, firewire cards cost less than $20 while ATA 133 cards cost over $70. I can also use these drives to back up some of my machines quite quickly.
Now of course, when I put in the 160GB Maxtor, the drive just sits in there and bounces around whenever we get an earthquake, but I live in Ohio and so if that were a problem, I could probably fashion a mount with some foam and a glue gun, but so far we haven't had an earthquake, and the box has a significant fan to keep the drive cool. With 2 beige G3s and a Ti-book and a couple of other computers kicking around, the ability to cart these drives around is just wonderful.
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