I wanted to know if it is as good as having a drive with firewire built in.
I read an article about the audigy and wondered if an enclosure would be "inferior".
This is stolen from Tom's Hardware:
"With a dedicated FireWire card using the Lucent FW323-04 processor, a 100-MB copy to disk took 15 seconds. With the Audigy card, the same operation took 22 seconds. So don't expect maximum output from FireWire on the Creative system. However, sound occupancy on the card does not seem to hamper output since the time only increased to 24 seconds when playing music from a digital source and with a Concert Hall effect. "
My concern is that it won't be as fast as a drive with built in firewire.
I want the flexibility that an enclosure will give me but I don't to sacrifice performance.
It's seems cheaper to get an ATA drive and a firewire enclosure.
But, it won't be worth it if it's a lot slower or has lot's of problems(compatiblity, falls appart, etc).
Also, you stated that they were expensive compared to usb enclosures.
Are you referring to usb1.1 or 2?