EXCLUSIVES

CP Technologies 3.5" FireWire Drive Enclosure
By Ric Getter

July 2004

Space. Just when you think you finally have enough of it, you realize that you need even more to back everything up. Fortunately, hard drive prices have been steadily dropping and a new, low-cost enclosure from CP Technologies (http://www.cptechusa.com) gives you an easy way to build your own external FireWire® drive. It not only provides you with a safe place to back up your most valuable assets, but it lets you take them with you, as well.

A number of vendors already offer pre-packaged external drives, but the advantages of going with a do-it-yourself solution will soon become obvious. One benefit is being able to choose your own hardware. When you buy a pre-packaged hard drive, you rarely know very much about the drive inside except for its size and, perhaps, rotation speed. If you're concerned about things like brand, model, and buffer-size, you're pretty much left in the dark. The second big factor is money. Even as storage costs are decreasing, the cost of packaged external hard drives are fairly steady. On the other hand, the prices of separately sold “bare" drives are all over the map thanks to temporary markdowns and rebate offers. For example, for this review, we went to our local electronics emporium and found our favorite brand-name 3.5" 7,200 RPM ATA drive with an 8MB buffer in a retail box (with cabling and mounting hardware we didn't need) for about a half a buck per gigabyte, after the store discounts and factory rebates.

The CP Technologies enclosure will let your dollar go even further; it's one of the lowest priced we've seen in stores or online. In fact, it was at a price point (under $70) that made us a little concerned about what we were going to see when we opened up the box. In terms of looks, it is obviously a very attractive piece of equipment, especially compared to the boring beige SCSI cases we've collected over the years. But it was surprising to discover that the only corners CP Tech cut were on the sleek, rounded ends of the case. For example, the external 12-volt power supply was not the mundane discount style we expected. It's a two-piece design with a standard, detachable 2-prong AC cable connected to a mid-stream transformer. The included FireWire cable is one of the most solidly constructed we've seen, notably fatter and heavier than Apple®'s standard issue. The case consists of an aluminum shell edged with high-impact plastic. In our testing, the case did an excellent job of dissipating heat, even when the drive was working very hard over a long period of time. The FireWire-400 controller (1394A) utilizes the fast and reliable Oxford 411 chipset. A red power LED and green activity LED on the front of the unit displays the drive's activity.
Installing your hard drive is simply a matter of unsnapping the two halves of the case, connecting the power and ATA cables, locking the drive down with four screws, and snapping the case back together. The process doesn't take much longer than un-boxing the enclosure and hard drive. Even before it's secured with the four included screws, the drive is snuggly fitted in the case. Both the power and ATA cable have to be inserted completely for the drive to seat correctly. The nice thing about this is that the connectors are held in securely, thanks to the design of the case. There's no risk of them coming loose as you transport the drive. A small instruction sheet is included with the enclosure. This provides helpful illustrations and some text that was rather unsuccessfully translated into English. You have to keep in mind that this represents a new market for the product and that the bugs are in the translation and not the technology.

We wanted to get an idea of the relative speed of FireWire-400 compared to the dual drive system in our G4. All three drive mechanisms have essentially identical performance specs. Moving a 5.5 MB folder of video files between two of the internal ATA drives took just over 5 minutes. Moving the same folder to the external took about 8 minutes. That's not as fast as the new-generation FireWire 800 (1394B) standard, but it is still a quick and convenient way to move lots of data. We used Carbon Copy Cloner to create a backup of our system partition on the external drive and booted from it without a problem.

The model we tested (CP-IE-3A) is for use exclusively with FireWire. CP Tech and many of its competitors offer models with both USB-2 and 1394A outputs. The FireWire-only option helps keep the costs down for Mac® users. CP Technologies offers a variety of other enclosures including a bus-powered 2.5" pocketsize drive as well as a variety of other accessories including a rather unique USB/Ir-DA wireless adapter.

One thing most Mac people have in common is that we don't mind paying a little extra for a better product. But that doesn't mean we can't take advantage of a good deal once in a while. Rolling your own external drive, especially with the kind of value the CP Technologies enclosure offers, can double your satisfaction of owning a good piece of hardware while saving more than a few dollars. And, you'll finally have the room (and security) of exploring some new frontiers of your own.

CP Technologies FireWire enclosure for ATA drives Model CP-IE-3A for any Mac with a FireWire interface. Available from a number of online retailers including TigerDirect.com and Zones.com for under $60.