Overclockers Australia - IceCube 3.5" FireWire Hard Drive Enclosure

IceCube 3.5" FireWire Hard Drive Enclosure
22th March 2002 - Article by Fad

While for most desktops, the range of peripherals are many, when you want to add something to a laptop your options are limited. This has always been a sacrifice made when choosing a laptop over a desktop machine. Desktops have IDE channels and PCI slots to add an extra hard drive, CD burner or zip drive. There are a few options left for laptop users - almost all laptops have USB ports, for example. However this is a very slow option when adding an extra hard drive. USB 1.0/1.1 maximum speed is 11Mbit/sec, which is a slow interface for a fast hard drive. Also it means that the maximum speed for adding a CD burner is 4x.

This is where IEEE1394 (FireWire) and USB 2.0 will change things. USB 2 is only relatively new however FireWire has been around for a while now and there are plenty of FireWire devices on the market. The main advantage of FireWire is the bus operates at a very fast 400mbit/sec.

There is also something else that is important when choosing a firewire enclosure. In the rush to bring products to market, some manufactures designed a bridge which was very slow compared to the true speed of the device. There is now a newer bridge called the "oxford 911 bridge", in which they redesigned the bridge to be faster. So watch out for it and ask for a oxford 911 bridge.

The price for this particular "IceCube" enclosure is AUD$279. There are several brands of drive enclosures around at the moment, however this one has the fast bridge, and also is of a nice design. It also has a blue led as the drive on indicator and activity led. It looks pretty cool.

Specifications

Contents (Enclosure, Cable, External Adapter, Power cord)
Produce Size (22cmx12.5cmx3.5cm)
Interface IDE->Firewire
Real Plug and Play
Hot-swappable connection
Full ATA-5 compliant
Support for ATA100
512kb Flash memory

Top View with comparison to a CD case.

Setup
The enclosure is initially empty, so a Barracuda IV 80gb hard drive was installed, as can be seen the inside of the enclosure is very clean.. The ATA100 cable can also be seen. Firewire enclosures have normally two ports, this allows devices to be daisy chained. So a machine only needs one port to connect to many devices.

Top view with drive installed and cover off

Here is a view of the back of the drive, showing the connectors.

Firewire also has very good support in almost all operating systems. This is a screen shot of Windows 2000, it is detected as a OXFORD IDE device as soon as it was plugged in. No drivers were installed. It was also tested in Windows XP, and that also worked without drivers. The box also says that Windows 98/ME are support.

Performance:

The Sisoft Sandra benchmarks put this drive just a bit slower than a ATA66 7200rpm drive, and they should be considering there is a Seagate Barracuda IV drive inside. Inside laptops except the higher range with 48gb hard drives, laptops normally have 4200rpm drives. As can be seen the 4200rpm drive is over one half the speed of the drive enclosure. So this drive would be an excellent upgrade for a laptop user wanting more hard drive space and faster access.

In conclusion, this would be an excellent upgrade choice for a person with a laptop. It would also be a good drive for a desktop user wanting a backup drive or to take files around from work and home. One disadvantage is that, due to the external power requirement, it's not as portable as it initially seems.

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