[Sneaky Snake]

I'm looking for a 3.5" drive case that has a built in USB hub. It doesn't need to be many ports, 2 or more is fine. Also it only needs to be a USB 2.0 case as I won't use firewire.


Thanks,
-Snake

[Jude]

Sneaky Snake, on February 16th 2009, 09:43 PM, said:

I'm looking for a 3.5" drive case that has a built in USB hub. It doesn't need to be many ports, 2 or more is fine. Also it only needs to be a USB 2.0 case as I won't use firewire.


Thanks,
-Snake

http://otherworldcomputing.com/
Try searching under "enclosure" -- I'm sure other places have them, too.
Jude

[Nail]

http://www.vantecusa...view_detail/182

http://www.pittjug.o...usb_20_151.html

http://shopping.nine...-reader-usb-hub



TigerDirect link to first product
http://www.tigerdire...ey=NexStar%20GX

[Greg Gant]

NewEgg pricing is pretty nice...
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817145138

And
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817171019

And with a card reader, esata
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817364009

And 2.5
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817121007

[Tetsuya]

out of curiousity, why wouldnt you use the far-superior Firewire?

[teflon]

because Apple are abandoning it.
USB is here to stay, thanks to intel pushing it forwards to USB3 and beyond, which will still maintain back compatibility, so it remains relevant. But should Sneaky eventually get a new mac its entirely likely that well see either eSATA or FW3200. And even then only on the high end, as macbooks have dropped FW and I suspect that a redesigned Mini might do so too, leaving FW800 as the only connection to the past.

but and its a big but, all enclosures come with USB, so FW is in addition to this not instead of. Theres a fair number of enclosures which have both FW and USB, and a subset thereof which will have FW pass through and USB hubs built in.
Why not spend the extra $30 and get the superior connections? Both of your macs have FW800, which is vastly faster than both FW400 and USB2.

[Bernie]

Tetsuya, on February 19th 2009, 10:24 AM, said:

out of curiousity, why wouldnt you use the far-superior Firewire?

When I got an external drive to use for Time Machine, I accepted a USB-only drive because it was cheaper (because it was on sale) and because I don't need the speed for a backup drive.

[The Liberator]

But you want that speed, you want it.

Liberator.

[teflon]

I agree that once Time Machine is in flow USB 2 isnt really a disadvantage, but TM is also massively inefficient because it requires that your drive is plugged in all the time. Something I really dont like.
So I have changed to having TM turned off and only backing up when I want to, once a day usually. Of course, at these times, the backups are going to be that much bigger and take that much longer, at which point the speed comes in handy.

[Greg Gant]

There's a whole host of time machine controls that can change Time Machine intervals and you can disconnect the external drive at your own free will, it just won't have the back ups for time in between. At work I have our Mac Pro fileserver with a internal Time Machine HD set hourly, at home I have an eSATA HD set two hours. (I have borderline paranoia over massive data loss so I have RAID1+0 at home plus the time machine). If you have a Mac Pro or G5, it might be worth just using an internal drive as a Time Machine backup.

[teflon]

well yes, you could do that, but considering that every time you then connect that drive it then immediately starts to backup, which can completely cut across what you want to do (and yeah, sure you can tell it to stop, but that takes a while too). Its just annoying.

Oh, and you can add to this that Time Machine is actually inherently quite broken. The way it works just asks for masses of fragmentation, (something Ive experienced twice (on two different machines) and come back from), doesnt play too nice when the drive isnt just for TM, will completely fill up a HDD and then make it self implode etc. etc. I mean its good, yeah, but you cant rely on it for anything other than winding back time to grab a file you accidentally deleted.
Thats why my main backup is actually a clone of my drive which is updated every time I have a big update to do/new app revisions come down the pipe etc. etc. TM gets used for everything else, and I plan on wiping it out every half year from now on because it slows down so much (and thats on a FW800 RAID 0).

Anyway, Time Machine doesnt even have a chance of being a real solution until ZFS filters through. I wouldnt expect TM to do ZFS till 10.7 though.

[yo-mike]

Iomega minimax from iomega is also an option.

There used to be tons of these types of drives. It seems many of the others are either no longer made or available


-Mike