Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Mac guys and gals: ? about external HDDs

The most important thing to do is figure out what chipset is in the external bay you are planning on buying. Odds are you'll want to go with 1394 for the Mac as the external bus. Inside the drive bay it might be IDE or SATA, the OS doesn't actually know what kind of drive is in the bay-it will treat the drive as a 1394 drive. It is up to the electronics that translate from 1394 to IDE/SATA/SCSI to enable fancy bits. If the enclosure is for IDE drives and you are planning on putting a 130gig or larger drive in the bay make sure that it supports a feature called '48bit LBA' which roughly translates to 'drives bigger than 127 gigs'. If it doesn't support this feature then it will treat large drives as 127 gigs and you'll probably want to throw it at the wall. For SATA you can assume that big drives will work.

I am going to stress this as I tested 1394 devices, including hard drives, in a previous life-research the 1394 chipset that is in the bay you are planning on buying. There was one that was known for being really fast-if I heard it I'd know it. There are a few out there-and its been awhile so I don't remember which ones but Agere comes to mind-that had some fun bugs like 'oops your data got deleted because you plugged a camera in while you were using the hard drive'. Personally I'd avoid the DIY route for this and just grab a well known brand off the shelf.