This might take awhile...

[giza]

I fired up an old 80 GB external hard dirve and started cleaning files off of it. One of my folders seems to be taking awhile to delete, however...



So... I have some old IDE hard drives laying around that I wouldn't might using for some extra storage and transport. But I have little experience with hard drive enclosures for IDE drives. Can anyone recommend some to me? Firewire 400 interface preferred... :-)

Comments

[camstone.livejournal.com]

I tend to like the ULTRA series.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1800603&CatId=2778

[giza.livejournal.com]

I like the look and features, but a couple of the reviews are very non-flattering. Any comments on the reviews? (The reviewers provided lots of technical details)

[camstone.livejournal.com]

Well, not sure about the read there. I have an Ultra USB that I have for my linksys fileserver. Not high use, but it's stable and I've had no issues. Although I've heard that ultra has had some clunker products too. Might want to reconsider them then.

[two-pi-r.livejournal.com]

Why bother properly deleting it? Just pop into fsdb and remove the links for that directory, then run fsck and when it complains tell it to ignore and not create lost+found files. :)

[giza.livejournal.com]

I don't feel comfortable enough with filesystems to do that. :-P

[kellic.livejournal.com]

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/External-Enclosures/

They make the best enclosures out there. Plus if you have FW800 they have have USB2/FW800 enclosures as well.

[jlick.livejournal.com]

Why are you even bothering spending money on drives that are so small (80gb)? Once you've bought a few enclosures for the old drives you could have afforded to buy a 500gb drive instead. My opinion: junk anything smaller than 250gb; consolidate your external storage on one or more 500gb+ drives.

Look into what the 'sweet point' of $/gb in your area for the drive plus enclosure. In Taiwan it is 500gb, but I know US prices tend to go down faster so 750gb might be the answer now for you. Even here where things like external enclosures are cheap, you could get an external 500gb with enclosure for the price of three bare enclosures.

[zeeth_kyrah]

Smaller drives are more reliable. As you approach higher data density, you also increase the potential quantum errors in the magnetic zones on your disk strata. Eventually, with current technology, you're just guessing what's on there and the on-disk error correction can't handle any more.

However, with error correction designed for incredible density, you can increase reliability enormously by reducing density. An 80G disk using technology which attempts to make 500G reliable assures you a much longer useful life for the product.

On the other hand, maybe Giza just bought what was "enough for his needs" at the time.

[jlick.livejournal.com]

I'm not questioning whether the drive was good enough when he bought it. But he says he wants to buy enclosures (plural) for old hard drives (plural). If he has three 80gb drives and buys three enclosures for them he gets 240gb of storage out of it when he could get a 500gb drive plus enclosure for about the same amount of money, maybe a bit less. I just don't see it be worth spending extra money now to be able to use such small drives.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Actually, I have an 80 GB and 2 40 GB drives laying around. Maybe a 20, too.

Here's the thing: I really like to get my moneys' worth out of hardware, and I will gladly use older hardware until it is no longer feasible to do so. Right now, for my needs (storing TV shows and making backups of my personal data), working with 80 GB at a time is plenty for me. So I see no reason to not make use of what I already have.

[kellic.livejournal.com]

That's a myth. Especially larger desktop drives. Most reliability problems with hard drives these days are with the actuator heads going bad and failing. In most cases many of these smaller hard drives are using the same density as larger ones just with fewer platters. The only time desity problems come into play are mobile devices such as 2.5" laptop drives that are being moved around a lot or microdrives. But traditional hard drives? Not really.

[mgucciard.livejournal.com]

Am I missing something here?
You're deleting the drive, so you can reuse it.
That takes quite a bit of time.
Why not format it?

[giza.livejournal.com]

There was some stuff on the drive that I wanted to keep.

[wildw0lf.livejournal.com]

The biggest problem with older enclosures is that many were limited to handling drives of certain sizes, some no bigger than 60gb, 80gb, 120gb, etc etc.

Any generic enclosure you buy today that has firewire 400 and/or USB2 should be fully capable of handing almost any size IDE drive (check the box for the size limit it can handle), and if all your drives are 120gb or smaller, this shouldn't even pose an issue at all.

You can buy generic enclosures typically for less than $30.

[giza.livejournal.com]

I'm actually looking at this enclosure (http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEFW911UPL/).

It's a bit pricey, but looks like it will meet my needs. Plus, I'm familliar with the company. My current external hard drive is from them and I've been happy with it.

[wildw0lf.livejournal.com]

Well, it certainly looks cool, and that's something you don't get with the cheaper enclosures.