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Understanding what a FireWire Enclosure Is
Unfortunately, there is no true external FireWire hard drive made for consumers to purchase. What is sold is a box that converts a standard IDE hard drive signal (like you find inside every computer) to a FireWire signal using a special chip. The drive connects to the chip using a standard IDE connection and then the chip converts the signal and then spits it out to a FireWire port.
Internal Hard Drive
LaCie and Maxtor both make FireWire enclosures pre-installed with a hard drive. DVvideo.com let's you choose the hard drive. This feature benefits you in three important areas: Price, Quality and flexibility. The drives our competitors aren't the highest performing drives on the market. We recommend using the IBM 180GXP 180 gig hard drive in our enclosures. This drive is faster and has a higher reliability rating. And as new technology is developed you are not stuck with an inferior drive. Simply take out the old one and replace it with a new one.Conversion Chip (a.k.a. bridge Board Chip)
We were the first to use the high speed oxford 911 chip by about 6 months. In that time our manufacturer developed and refined their own firmware enabling our product to achieve higher speeds, and more compatibility. Our products were the first to be compatible with OS X and the first to be compatible with ATA-6 drives with sizes larger than 137 gigabytes. Because our firmware in the enclosure is up gradable, you can be sure that as new technology developed our products will be there to support it.Recently we released the FireWire 800/USB 2.0 Black box enclosure. It incorporates the new Oxford 922 chip and includes 3 FireWire 800 ports. The new chip is so fast that it is no longer the bottle neck of the performance with the ability to reach speeds of 80 MB/s. But in real world tests, the drives will perform at around 50 MB/s because currently that is the maximum speed the most of the drives can reach.
Enclosure design
Drives that don't get hot perform better and last longer. Our enclosure contain a dual or triple fan cooling system. No other enclosure on the market ensures that your drives stay cool like ours do. The enclosures are durable with an ABS plastic exterior covering an steel frame inside. Our cable don't break because of their heavy duty teflon exterior. We use a heavy duty power supply to ensure your enclosure won't die. The FireWire ports are plated in gold, and we include a heavy gage FireWire cable with superior noise shielding ensuring that the signal can move fast. There is simply no enclosure build like ours. Adding a drive is simple and should only take 3 minutes for someone who know what they are doing and 10 minutes for a novice.
