I'm relatively newb, but I know a pretty good fair share about my system.
Anyway, I recently purchased this harddrive, taking advantage of a holiday sale they had on it (it came out to be $107 with a rebate).
Now I'm in the market for an external enclosure, but while shopping, some stuff has come up that makes me a little trepidacious about just picking up any ol' enclosure.
I've been told that for sure I want to go with an aluminum enclosure, as it dissipates heat the best. Though, some I've looked at have cooling fans built into them. Obviously this adds to the cost, but is it necessary? Specifically for the drive I picked up?
Also, I'm going to have to have a firewire connectable drive. I'm having troubles with getting USB 2.0 to run for some reason (I've put in 2 different USB 2.0 pci cards and one crashed my system, the other is just running USB 1).
I've got no troubles with firewire, so I think it's best to stick with that. It's labled as iLink S400 on my system.
I don't know if this is an issue or not, but as I've been shopping at places like pricewatch.com, some enclosures are listed saying they support specific gig sizes or "up to" an amount. I guess I don't understand why an enclosure would or wouldn't support an amount of gig space. Is this an issue at all I should be concerned with?
If anyone could help me out with my questions, or better yet give me any recommendations on actual products or brands, it'd be greatly appreciated.
And, I suppose since this is my first time doing anything with a "home made" external drive, is there anything I have to be aware of as far as formatting goes once I finally have it all set up? I have Windows XP SP2 running, when I connect the new drive, will it be recognized and supported automatically, or am I going to have to do anything special to get it up and running. The product is "OEM", so there was no software or anything with it.
Thanks again
-Matty