The more I look, the more I find myself ignorant. I want a dual bay external enclosure (already have 2 separate 1 drive enclosures by SIIG and they're excellent) but I had been hearing about the Oxford 922 (I have 912s) and am looking for the widest capabilities of these to use in future machines.

That terribly long 1st post loses me and I was hoping for a little primer for my 1st purchase of a dual bay. I'm planning on using 2 500GB ATA100s at first more for storage offloading of my network drives that could be portable to use with other machines individually when my network goes down again.

Also bridgeboards are new to me (understand the concept) but not the real world application and throughput parameters. Any, might some one venture a short tutorial for me? Thanks.

Hi chuckenheimer

Chipsets for external enclosures are a difficuilt thread in my opinion. For example my DVD burner collection is more or less in external enclosures with USB+FW or USB only. The USB+FW combos use Prolific3507 or GLE811/OX911.

At all both combo chipsets work with no problem. Sometimes the Prolific is a little bitchy with some of my Plextor drives. I guess it is difficuild to recommend a special chipset. But from what I read the Oxford Semiconductor products are really good (under Windows).

In the contect of your question the term "bridgeboard" is a description of a PCB with a USB/Firewire/eSATA to IDE/SATA converter. In general a bridgeboard is more or less a protocoll converter from one bus (protocoll) to an other.

And one last sentence to your plan using ATA100 HDDs ... ATA HDD drives are mor and more vanishing from the market and I'm sure in the very near future you'll not find any new designed IDE HDDs anymore. I'd invest in a hardware using/supporting SATA HDDs... for this reason I'll pimp a few of my external enclosures with an SATA comatible bnridge board supporting SATA optical drives.