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Well, the Oxford 911 chipset seems to be the most common. Almost all the enclosures I've seen use it. I have no idea what Maxtor is using with their One Touch drives.
I have a 200Gb Maxtor One Touch, which is firewire/usb2. 7200 RPM drive with 8mb buffer I believe. The 250gb one is 5400 rpm I think. I mainly use it for DVD ripping and as a backup drive. I chose the One Touch because it supports hard drive power down when not in use. As far as I can tell, none of the other enclosures I've seen support that feature, which I think is very important for extending drive life (especially at 7200 rpm, which gets pretty darn hot).
The only issue with the One Touch is that you need to install a driver to use the button (and the power down feature too), although I think (I hope!) you can forego installing it if you want to simply use it as an external hard drive on a computer that doesn't have the drivers.
There are many hard drive enclosure brands out there, many of which use the same chipset (possibly with different revisions or firmware), with the resultant quality differences. I have a cheap-ass (Welland?) firewire/usb2 enclosure for my DVD burner, and the fan noise is just terrible. But the One Touch is whisper quiet. I also had major issues daisy-chaining the One Touch with my DVD burner, causing one or the other drive to drop out or hang the computer!
Don't rely on daisy-chaining drives with the cheaper enclosures...get a good firewire hub instead. I got a Belkin 5 port firewire hub for $90 Canuckbucks. Well worth it.
5400 RPM hard drives: Run cooler. Slower, cheaper, and quieter, but not really noticeable unless you intend to do a lot of DV work. These drives should last longer, in theory. Higher capacities available.
7200 RPM: Run hotter, sometimes very hot. Louder. More expensive, especially at larger sizes.
Cache size is fairly important. A 5400 RPM drive with 8mb cache can outperform a 7200 RPM 2mb drive, depending on the application. Since you're just using the drive as backup, it shouldn't matter in your case.
Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him...a super-callused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.
Gameshow host: "Is taking Viagra kosher during Passover dinner?"
Whoopee Goldberg: "Not if it leads to pork."
Kermit the Frog: "Hey, that's my line!"
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