External USB/Firewire drives that work

thanks

 

Note: If anyone thinks I should create a new thread devoted to external SATA hard drives, feel free to let me know.

My main desktop's motherboard is an ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe, Intel 875P chipset; my laptop is a Compal 56, Intel 855 chipset. OSes are XP Pro and Home, SP2. I recently bought the following to use with both:

1. Syba SATA PC Card (has two SATA I ports), uses Silicon Image chipset (for my laptop);
2. E-Power 3.5" SATA enclosure (internal & external interfaces are both SATA; uses unspecified "newest" Prolific chipset. It's a nice, aluminum, vented enclosure with an 80mm fan. Despite the fan, it's very quiet. It has an on/off button, which is great, and a power LED. It came with a pass-through PCI SATA adapter cable, one end of which plugs into a SATA header on my motherboard. Works quite well.
3. Samsung SpinPoint 3.5" 120GB 7200rpm 8MB cache hard drive.

Anyway, perhaps the Prolific chipset is too new, as I'm experiencing the same problem described by Euser on the previous page:

Every aspect of TI works great and very fast with this setup except when I try to boot from the CD. The boot CD attempts to load the program, but then freezes my systems. I get no error messages. The only way I can boot from the CD is when I turn off the external drive. But when I do that and then turn on the external drive again, Acronis can't see the drive.

I agree with Euser that since a lot of us are using external drives, we need to be able to boot from the CD and access the drive(s) in case we're ever in an emergency situation and need to restore image(s).

I really like this SATA enclosure, so I'm going to keep it and hope that Acronis will eventually add support for the Prolific chipsets. But I'm also going to get an external drive that can be accessed/seen when booting from CD.

 

I noticed a couple of users had bad luck with the BYTECC 'El Cheapo USB 2.0 external enclosures. I just bought two of them the other day and this morning successfully Cloned my C: drive to an external WD 80 Gig drive. Worked so smooth it was almost painless. The BYTECC I got is the ME-320U2 and supports upt 300Gig drives. Happy camper for $25.99 each.

Just for grins, I installed 5 different old drives in the enclosure just to see if any failed. One did and I threw it out. All the rest worked just like they were natively attached, or better!

Mick

 

MickM

I too have a BYTECC (El Cheapo) model, and TI sees it with no problem. I never listed it because I have a DVD-RW drive in it. But the standalone version of TI see's ith with no problem. This is how I restore my system from DVD backups.

Storage_man

 

I picked up a Vantec Nexstar NST-350UF, it has both USB2 and Firewire. Since I only have USB1.1 on my PC, I used the Firewire port. The drive (300GB Seagate) is partitioned as 3 100Gb drives. Each one is recognized in Explorer, and I have no problem copying files totalling over 6GB. However, as soon as I start TI9 trial version, TI does not see these drives, and Explorer can no longer see or access them afterwards. If I reboot my PC, everything is fine, that is, until I try running TI again.

Any help would be appreciated.