External 5.25" Enclosure $28

[suprapsu]

I found this one website, that has the External 5.25/3.5" USB 2.0 Enclosure Kit for $28.00.

This a great kit because now I have a DVD-R drive for my laptop as well as desktop. I bought 2 of these and it burns from disc to disc without a problem. In addition, the guys from HardwareCooling are very quick with shipping and seems to care about their customers alot.

Here is the link
External Enclosure

I had ripped this off of Bensbargains. Let me know what you guys think about the External Case

 

[waharris007]

Uh, dude... Did you just repost yourself?

Repost

 

[Winchester]

lol

 

[vladgur]

hmm, this reeks of either newbeeism or self-promotions:

I stole from bensbargains...Fan controller from HardwareCooling
ripped from BensBargains....Bay Cooler from HardwareCooling

And of course the original....again from hardware cooling

Is there nothing to "steal" from bens bargains but the hardwarecooling.com ??

 

[Mltsao]

Lock

 

[weepul]

good case, good price, bad poster.

//krunk (^_^x)

 

[axskkyline]

hehe... mean, but ur right... most likely a self-promoter

 

[skisteven1]

As much as this post should probably be deleted or something....does anyone know how the speed on a drive in this enclosure compares to straight off the mobo? I'm doing some disk-intensive video editing, and this would be great if the speed is the same or higher. Also, anybody know what these normally go for?

 

[xkenny013]

I bought this same item from NewEgg last week for $40.99. It worked fine with my 300gb Maxtor 5400rpm drive, but the USB 2.0 interface wasn't fast enough for my needs.

I really bought it for use with my Pioneer DVR-105 DVD-R/RW drive, but while it reads fine off the USB enclosure, it won't write to it. It actually records the Lead-In data (this was with an audio CD), and then got stuck there for 10 minutes before I aborted. I did this a couple of times, so I know it fails all the time.

Anyone else have better luck with this (or a similar item) as far as DVD-R/-RW burners go?

 

[skisteven1]

The USB wasn't fast enough for a 5400rpm drive? That doesn't sound encouraging....

regular ATA interface is 100 MByte/sec peak, right? and USB 2.0 is 480Mbit/sec -> 60MByte/sec.

Isn't that about what throughput on most ATA drives is?

 

[TTM77]

I have this but I don't have a USB 2.0. I put my 40GB and 80GB hard drive in it. It works fine.I haven't try with the DVD burner though. When I put in my 160GB, it reconize only 120. What gives? If I put this into my computer I need a PCI card to reconize all 160GB. So what do U do with a USB?

 

[Moffat Cafe]

I believe this is the same one Dealsonic sells for $30. Might be a difference in shipping costs.

 

[skisteven1]

Originally posted by: xkenny013
I bought this same item from NewEgg last week for $40.99. It worked fine with my 300gb Maxtor 5400rpm drive, but the USB 2.0 interface wasn't fast enough for my needs.

The USB wasn't fast enough? what were you doing? That's exactly why I'm worried about buying it... What type of speeds did you get? I'm looking for about 25MBytes/sec consistantly

I really bought it for use with my Pioneer DVR-105 DVD-R/RW drive, but while it reads fine off the USB enclosure, it won't write to it. It actually records the Lead-In data (this was with an audio CD), and then got stuck there for 10 minutes before I aborted. I did this a couple of times, so I know it fails all the time.

That's really weird....maybe you could try with CD-R's until it works (much cheaper!

 

[Nailbunny]

I've got this exact enclosure casing a DVD+RW burner. Picked one up off Ebay for $15 shipped. I had to get it cuz my dually Tyan board doesn't support DVD+RW connected to the mobo. I have burned about 30+ full length movie DVD's with it, as well as tons of data/audio CD's and never had any problems.

The main thing with writing to DVD with it is make sure it's connected to a USB 2.0 port and not a USB 1.1 .. if connected to 1.1 it will take forever (if at all) to write.

Only complaint about the enclosure is it is a tad loud, but nothing too bothersome.

 

[jna]

Originally posted by: vladgur
hmm, this reeks of either newbeeism or self-promotions:

I stole from bensbargains...Fan controller from HardwareCooling
ripped from BensBargains....Bay Cooler from HardwareCooling

And of course the original....again from hardware cooling

Is there nothing to "steal" from bens bargains but the hardwarecooling.com ??

I wonder if the mods know he is an employee?

 

[xkenny013]

I was doing full-frame capture (720x480) NTSC video capture (29.97fps), using the Huffy compression algorithm ... judging from the 1:53:00 AVI capture (~116gb), that should come out to approximately 17mb per second.

If I hook the drive up to the standard IDE bus (ATA133), it runs just fine dropping 0 frames for standard video. On the USB 2.0 connector, it dropped a LOT of frames.

I'm using a ASUS A7V333 MB which has USB 2.0 built onto the board. I also did a speed test of just copying a file, and verified that the ports I was using were significantly faster than the USB 1.1. ports (also included on the MB).

So ... if USB 2.0 can really go 60mb/sec ... well, I don't know what the hold-up was. Perhaps it is not the fault of the enclosure, but if it wasn't, I guess I don't know what was.

I ended up moving the Pioneer DVR-105 DVD-R/-RW drive over to a secondary system that had a spare IDE port. I burn my DVDs across my network now, and it works just fine.

Nailbunny: Which DVD+R/+RW drive are you using?

 

[xkenny013]

Originally posted by: TTM77
I have this but I don't have a USB 2.0. I put my 40GB and 80GB hard drive in it. It works fine.I haven't try with the DVD burner though. When I put in my 160GB, it reconize only 120. What gives? If I put this into my computer I need a PCI card to reconize all 160GB. So what do U do with a USB?

You may need to tell Windows to recognize the larger volume. Here's the registry key:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters]
"EnableBigLba"=dword:1

Let us know how it goes.

 

[skisteven1]

Originally posted by: xkenny013
I was doing full-frame capture (720x480) NTSC video capture (29.97fps), using the Huffy compression algorithm ... judging from the 1:53:00 AVI capture (~116gb), that should come out to approximately 17mb per second.

If I hook the drive up to the standard IDE bus (ATA133), it runs just fine dropping 0 frames for standard video. On the USB 2.0 connector, it dropped a LOT of frames.

I'm using a ASUS A7V333 MB which has USB 2.0 built onto the board. I also did a speed test of just copying a file, and verified that the ports I was using were significantly faster than the USB 1.1. ports (also included on the MB).

So ... if USB 2.0 can really go 60mb/sec ... well, I don't know what the hold-up was. Perhaps it is not the fault of the enclosure, but if it wasn't, I guess I don't know what was.

I ended up moving the Pioneer DVR-105 DVD-R/-RW drive over to a secondary system that had a spare IDE port. I burn my DVDs across my network now, and it works just fine.

Nailbunny: Which DVD+R/+RW drive are you using?

This is exactly what I was afraid of. I'm doing pretty much the same thing, except full frames instead of Huffy (the difference is negligible). Does anyone have info on exactly how fast you can write/read to this drive on the fly?

 

[dchakrab]

"Supports up to 128GB Hard Drives
Supports up to UDMA/100 "

Wouldnt this mean that this is A. only good for smaller drives, and B. not as fast as an ATA 133 connection to a motherboard / pci card? Would the USB connection be the bottleneck, or the UDMA 100 transfer rating?

I might grab one, just because it would be nice to be able to carry information around on a portable drive...could be a happy home for my 40G drive when i upgrade, but i doubt this is a good video editing solution. A regular fast internal ATA 133 drive might be faster, but most of the people i know who edit video use a smaller (relatively) scsi drive to edit / render, and then use larger 7200 rpm drives to store (if necessary) or a dvd burner. I've talked to several who said 10000 rpm scsi was definitely worth the price...what were you guys using before this, and how usable is it on a pc? What OS?

-Dave.

 

[Keego]

So I could say.. take my 120gb hdd out of my computer and leave my scsi boot drive in, and use this on the USB 2.0 and not lose any load speed on games?

 

[fxsts]

Just FYI, Compgeeks has a pretty good combo deal for external enclosure, DVD-ROM, USB 2.0 PCI card if anyone needs more than just an enclosure.

http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtId=A-G48EXT-K1

 

[xkenny013]

This is exactly what I was afraid of. I'm doing pretty much the same thing, except full frames instead of Huffy (the difference is negligible).

In my experience, the Huffy compression algorithm gives me a near 2:1 compression ratio. In other words, it's *well* worth using it.

I've talked to several who said 10000 rpm scsi was definitely worth the price...what were you guys using before this, and how usable is it on a pc? What OS?

My set-up is a Windows 2000 based PC (Athlon XP 2400+), with 512K of RAM. The system drive is an older 120gb drive, but the capture drives are two Western Digital 7200rpm 200gb drives, plus one new Maxtor 300gb 5400rpm drive. Hooked to the ATA/133 bus, none of the drives drop any frames, and CPU usage in VirtualDub varies between 50 and 60% during AVI captures.

FWIW -- I also just ran a Capture test at full frame rate (720x480) in uncompressed mode. On either the 7200rpm or 5400rpm drive (attached to the IDE ATA/133 interface), I am still seeing 0 frames dropped (just a small, 25 second capture test). The actual data rate came in at around 30mb/sec.

That said, I rather doubt that a 10000rpm SCSI drive is necessary to handle (uncompressed) AVI video captures. Perhaps in the days of ATA/33 (or ATA/66?), but not now.

 

[skisteven1]

Originally posted by: xkenny013

This is exactly what I was afraid of. I'm doing pretty much the same thing, except full frames instead of Huffy (the difference is negligible).

In my experience, the Huffy compression algorithm gives me a near 2:1 compression ratio. In other words, it's *well* worth using it.

Y'know what? You're right, I forgot to measure the MB/sec on the Huffy compressed file...I was thinking of the full frames capture. -- Speaking of which, I think my card captures with some codec or another by hardware encoding...what kind of card do you use? (i'm in the market for one...) Have you had success with it?

I've talked to several who said 10000 rpm scsi was definitely worth the price...what were you guys using before this, and how usable is it on a pc? What OS?

My set-up is a Windows 2000 based PC (Athlon XP 2400+), with 512K of RAM. The system drive is an older 120gb drive, but the capture drives are two Western Digital 7200rpm 200gb drives, plus one new Maxtor 300gb 5400rpm drive. Hooked to the ATA/133 bus, none of the drives drop any frames, and CPU usage in VirtualDub varies between 50 and 60% during AVI captures.

FWIW -- I also just ran a Capture test at full frame rate (720x480) in uncompressed mode. On either the 7200rpm or 5400rpm drive (attached to the IDE ATA/133 interface), I am still seeing 0 frames dropped (just a small, 25 second capture test). The actual data rate came in at around 30mb/sec.

That said, I rather doubt that a 10000rpm SCSI drive is necessary to handle (uncompressed) AVI video captures. Perhaps in the days of ATA/33 (or ATA/66?), but not now.

I agree that SCSI is nice for video editing/capturing, but by no means necessary with today's IDE ATA interfaces.

Does anyone have numbers on actual speed of just copying a file to this drive? or better yet, creating and writing a file directly to the drive....

 

[alexruiz]

Originally posted by: skisteven1

Originally posted by: xkenny013

This is exactly what I was afraid of. I'm doing pretty much the same thing, except full frames instead of Huffy (the difference is negligible).

In my experience, the Huffy compression algorithm gives me a near 2:1 compression ratio. In other words, it's *well* worth using it.

Y'know what? You're right, I forgot to measure the MB/sec on the Huffy compressed file...I was thinking of the full frames capture. -- Speaking of which, I think my card captures with some codec or another by hardware encoding...what kind of card do you use? (i'm in the market for one...) Have you had success with it?

I've talked to several who said 10000 rpm scsi was definitely worth the price...what were you guys using before this, and how usable is it on a pc? What OS?

My set-up is a Windows 2000 based PC (Athlon XP 2400+), with 512K of RAM. The system drive is an older 120gb drive, but the capture drives are two Western Digital 7200rpm 200gb drives, plus one new Maxtor 300gb 5400rpm drive. Hooked to the ATA/133 bus, none of the drives drop any frames, and CPU usage in VirtualDub varies between 50 and 60% during AVI captures.

FWIW -- I also just ran a Capture test at full frame rate (720x480) in uncompressed mode. On either the 7200rpm or 5400rpm drive (attached to the IDE ATA/133 interface), I am still seeing 0 frames dropped (just a small, 25 second capture test). The actual data rate came in at around 30mb/sec.

That said, I rather doubt that a 10000rpm SCSI drive is necessary to handle (uncompressed) AVI video captures. Perhaps in the days of ATA/33 (or ATA/66?), but not now.

I agree that SCSI is nice for video editing/capturing, but by no means necessary with today's IDE ATA interfaces.

Does anyone have numbers on actual speed of just copying a file to this drive? or better yet, creating and writing a file directly to the drive....

I suggest you get an enclosure with FIREWIRE interface.... The IDE-firewire bridge must be the Oxford 911 and you can get sustained data transfer rates as high as 35 MB/sec. Despite the theoretical advantage of USB 2.0, for this kind of job (external drive) the only guy in town is still firewire. Try it yourself.

A firewire enclosure should be like $5-$10 more expensive than a USB 2.0. I personally suggest you get a COMBO enclosure for $15-$20 more (both interfaces). A PCI firewire card runs for about $15 shipped. If you are already spending bick bucks in those huge hard drives, $35 additional green bills are well worth the effort.


Alex

 

[xkenny013]

Y'know what? You're right, I forgot to measure the MB/sec on the Huffy compressed file...I was thinking of the full frames capture. -- Speaking of which, I think my card captures with some codec or another by hardware encoding...what kind of card do you use? (i'm in the market for one...) Have you had success with it?

Believe it or not, it's a fairly old Pinnacle Studio PCTV PCI card ... it accepts Composite, S-Video or coax (tuner) inputs. This card runs beautifully with VirtualDub. You can do raw AVI grabs, but it's far more efficient to use the Huffy compression routines (should be lossless compression). Failing that, I think any card with the Brooktree chipset will probably work. Do a Google search for Brooktree Capture and you should find plenty of info.

Prior to this, I tried one of the newer ATI cards, as well as the ASUS TV Tuner card, but none of them worked properly with VirtualDub ... the best they could do with VirtualDub was 320x240 (or thereabouts), whereas with their own proprietary software, they could do the full 720x480. Since this was the path I intended to do (raw capture, downstream MPEG encoding), I decided that this was the best card for my purposes. Your needs may differ, and the other cards may do a pretty good job of doing MPEG2 compression on-the-fly ... but I think I have more flexibility to get better results if I don't do the MPEG2 compression in real-time.

Also, I doubt any of the encoding is done in hardware ... how fast is your CPU?

I suggest you get an enclosure with FIREWIRE interface.... The IDE-firewire bridge must be the Oxford 911 and you can get sustained data transfer rates as high as 35 MB/sec. Despite the theoretical advantage of USB 2.0, for this kind of job (external drive) the only guy in town is still firewire. Try it yourself.

A firewire enclosure should be like $5-$10 more expensive than a USB 2.0. I personally suggest you get a COMBO enclosure for $15-$20 more (both interfaces). A PCI firewire card runs for about $15 shipped. If you are already spending bick bucks in those huge hard drives, $35 additional green bills are well worth the effort.

Good to know. The enclosure was originally purchased for the DVD-R/-RW drive, so blazing speed was not my concern. Based on my current set-up, I no longer need any sort of enclosure (I'm returning mine to NewEgg) ... but should I want to expand my rig even further in the future, I will consider a FireWire enclosure instead, assuming it supports burning to DVD-R/-RW drives.