Ditto on the OWC recommendation, not only the best housing, but the best Firewire chipsets (in terms of compatibility of being able to boot from it). And the performance is great too!
A third recommendation for OWC. When the higher ups at the office wouldn't buy one (instead insisting on LaCie drives that kept failing) I just bought my own and wrote it off as an unreimbursed business expense. I still use it to back up my own data and maintain several drive images for different machines. The performance kicks ass.
It's not obvious in all cases if they use Hitachi, but I know sometimes when the Hitachi drives have Mail In Rebates, the same rebates are on the OWC external drive of the same HD size/spec. You could always call and ask, they're really friendly and helpful.
And of course, you could always just buy the enclosure alone and put your own HD of choice in there!
OK, I've popped in a USB 2.0 drive until I can wrangle a FW800 drive mail order. Will look into OWC for sure. Edit: can someone tell me why the 1TB drive is cheaper than the 640GB or the 800GB? http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firew...erformanceRAID
I still can't get my widgets to pop up, every time I hit that key all that happens is my sound output boosts. I must be doing something wrong.
Any recommendations for good but inexpensive and small desktop speakers? I don't want monster ones sitting next to this guy but the on board sound is really anemic.
Whoops, realized I didn't address #1. If your mobo does not have an eSATA port built in (or has an eSATA connector on it which you could attach a face- or rear-plate with the eSATA connection) then yes you will have to buy an eSATA PCI card like a soundcard or firewire card (if you don't have firewire built in).