FIREWIRE VS SATA

  Firewire these days has given more people grief than just about any other storage format. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, the firewire specifications weren't designed to be used for hard drives. In order for hard drives to be attached to the Firewire bus on your computer the signal has to be converted to the Firewire (or USB) protocol, then converted back at the enclosure end by a Bridge Board. This conversion sometimes causes problems with data transfer and can cause data corruption as well as slow data transfer speeds due to the conversion overhead. Another problem is that the Firewire enclosure industry is so competitive that most manufacturers cut corners to market the least expensive product that they can to gather market share. The age old axiom holds true that you get what you pay for. These enclosures are build with no cooling whatsoever and the small brick power supplies that contribute to early hard drive failures. They keep the heat generated by the hard drive inside the enclosure, basically baking the drive to an early death.

  There are many uses for a high quality Firewire Hard Drive Enclosure. On-location photography when used with a PowerBook or Laptop for downloading photos from a camera for instance. If you want a means of remote data capture with the ability to swap the drive into your main storage enclosure when you get back to the office check out our Burly Hot Swap Firewire 400/800/USB Single Drive Enclosures. If you're capturing video try the Burly Two Bay Firewire 400/800/USB Enclosure. These units work great since you can remove the drive tray and install it into our fully compatible SATA Hot Swap Enclosures. All Burly Hot Swap Firewire enclosures have a built in power supply, excellent cooling and are available in single, two, four and eight drive models, that may be daisy chained (linked one after another). Our single bay enclosures are also available as a native SATA Enclosure. These SATA enclosures can be direct connected to your PowerBook, MacBook Pro or PC laptop via a PCMCIA or Express34 Host Card. These Cards can mount up to 10 drives using a Port Multiplier Enclosure or up to two drives directly connected. You will achieve speeds unheard of with Firewire enclosures.