Disk Enclosure or Lacie Rugged style drive?

[MorganIR]

Hi,

I work as a mobile recordist and need to increase my portable storage options. Up til now I've relied on Lacie D2 drives but they aren't the quietest and there are persistent issues with PSU's (although I've never had issues myself).

I record to PTLE8 on a new Macbook Pro i5. What I would like to do is get an enclosure which would then allow me to rotate drives for different projects easily. I would very much prefer to have the option to use the drive bus powered.

I see excellent ones available from Macsales.com such as this: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/on-the-go

I would like to source one similar in the UK but it needs to have the Oxford 91x chipset so that it works correctly with Pro Tools.

My other option would be to buy something like a 7200 Lacie Rugged drive. It is readily available in the UK with no hassle but I am wondering what the performance is like, and of course I would not be able to swap drives around since it is a "locked" enclosure.

I was wondering if anyone had recommendations or been down this road?

Thanks,
Iwan

[priorytools]

7200 rpm Rugged's. . .

[MorganIR]

How quiet/noisy is the rugged? Any fans inside the enclosure?

[priorytools]

They're v quiet . . No fans . .

[MorganIR]

Thanks for your help.
I'm still looking into enclosures but am happy now that I have the Lacie Rugged as a baack up plan if I can't locate a DIY drive.

[basslik]

Originally Posted by MorganIR

Thanks for your help.
I'm still looking into enclosures but am happy now that I have the Lacie Rugged as a baack up plan if I can't locate a DIY drive.

Save the diy route, I just bought a couple of these and they rock / noiseless OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro FireWire 800/400, eSATA + USB2 external Solutions up to 2.0TB - Plug & Play Quad Interface