crap i guess i was too late to warn u ... um, try to return it cuz it'll save u a lot of firewire headaches

Isnt firewire the best????

This whole thing is a mess. It never ends

@railgrinder

Thanks for the warning. The only reason I bought the enclosure is because Beach Hobo said he had good results with the NEC 3500 specifically using this chipset AND the latest firmware upgrade (that last bit is important). So I did go out on a limb knowingly, and if it's doesn't work out, I'll return it for a refund or more likely try another brand/model. If worse comes to worse, I have a great 8X burner using my Oxford chipset enclosure.

To NetSlider: (abt the Seagate HDD). I emailed Seagate yesterday to find out when those drives will be available for sale. I got a reply from them and they will come out around March 2005 with no specific price point. Someone on the X1000 forums thought it could be in the price range of $300 for the 100gb 7200.1rpm model.

Also Netslider, when you get the enclosure which you just bought, PLEASE write a small review (not long) of what you think of the enclosure and how well it performs with the NEC ND-3500A. Point out the good & bad points if you are able to. Also, can you post your results from the TY DVD+R discs using both Firewire & USB2.

I used the program NetSlider mentioned in his last post [HD Tach], and the internal HDD (which is a TOSHIBA 60gb 4200rpm) gave me a result of 29.4mb/s. I assume this is pretty good for a laptop HDD.

**Btw, where can I find the firmware update to the Prolific chipset (9/7/2004). If I get the case NetSlider just bought, I want to make sure its fully capable of burning DVDs without any problems.

I found where to get the Prolific FW upgrade but not sure which one to use. There's this one: fw_pl3507A_d042204 (for Revision A chips) & one for fw_pl3507B_d042204 (for any other PL-3507 chips). Will the latest enclosures have the latter one? Btw, are both firmwares the one that was updated 9/7/2004?

Also should ppl updating the Prolific Chipset firmware download RomWriter v2.1.4. Here is where I found the links to the firmware: http://member.newsguy.com/~siccos/PL3507%20Firmware.htm

Edit: After reading the thread railgrinder provided for us [http://forums.storagereview.net/inde...howtopic=15437], it seems the Oxford 911 chipset is more reliable and better performing than the Prolific Chipset. Of course h-b mentioned that you NEVER know which one your getting since most places doesn't mention it on their website/retailer.

@Crea78

Why you only have to look in our own fabulous forums for the 9/7/2004 Prolific firmware as provided by Beach-Hobo and hosted by Minchin.

http://www.ahgogo.net/ProlificFirmware.zip

Thanks for the update on the Seagate drives. Sorry for my French, but that sucks !@#$%! a$$! It was supposed to be September originally. Now march of next year? Not so concerned about the price, just finally wanted a large FAST HD since that has long been the bottleneck of laptops (well, desktops too, but laptops way more so). BTW, if you are interested, HD Tach is a simple little program and it's results should certainly not be used as the end all be all of a hard drive's performance. www.storagereview.com continues to be the premiere web site on providing info about hard drive benchmark methodologies and testing a lot of different scenarios that are valid to desktop computer usage (as opposed to server usage patterns). Railgrinder was wise in providing a link to that resource.

I will certainly provide my experience and the results of my testing with this new enclosure. It's only been through following the trials and tribulations of Beach-Hobo and others that I gained the knowledge to help me out in this situation (so far all my experimentation with firewire and usb enclosures have been with hard drives the past three years). I'll give back what I can.

P.S. I wander if we can get a collective thread together of these external enclosure experiences and have them posted as a sticky?

In regards to all the different chipsets being mentioned, I think it will come down to how you plan on using your external enclosure. It looks like I'm going to end up using a Prolific chipset enclosure for my optical drive and an Agere/Prolific/Silicon Image chipset enclsure for my HD. (Agere handles firewire, Prolific handles USB, SI handles Serial ATA). As Beach-Hobo mentioned all Delayed Write Failed messages while using a HD via the firewire interface disappeared when I installed WinXP Service Pack 2. This was using the HD in my Oxford chipset enclosure and my Agere chipset enclosure.

I currently have two external HDDs [120gb & 250gb] -- both from Western Digital and they are connected using USB2 ports. Like you NetSlider, I also plan on using the Prolific Chipset for my DVD-RW drive as well. I suppose having three external enclosures won't be too much of a problem. So far, I've had no problems with my WD external drives and they have been great so far -- of course they are the USB2/Firewire versions and not internal.

Thx for the link to the 9/7/2004 Prolific firmware NetSlider. I emailed h-b not too long ago for the file as well, but you were quicker. The readme file says you can use ROMWriter but using the USB2 port. Is it also possible to install the FW upgrade using the firewire port as well, or no?

Also, how can we tell which version of the Prolific Chipset is included on the enclosure (A/B/C). The firmware update is ONLY for B/C, but is there a program or way to find out which version you currently have?

You can only FLASH via USB (not Firewire). I know there's a problem with more than one Prolific 3507 attached together. I know Oxford works but not multiple case Prolific's.

I also spent way too much money and time on these external cases.... Unfortunately, all my Oxford911 case were more than 2 years old... and none is capable of going over 13MB for ATAPI device even with the configuration setting updates....
When a HD is attached (Maxtor 250GB), ATTO shows that each is capable of going up to 35-38MB/s.
Then I thought (I am such a sucker for such stuff), why not convert my SCSI enclosure (2 bay) to house all these burners.... Got one of the Oxford922 FW800 chip bridgeboard from CoolDrives. The board came, can't get my Litey (CD-Burners) to work. Sent them back to the shop, they tested it and confirm it is okay. Received it back, still can't get it to work.
I don't know if it is the cable or the bridgeboard. The 922 USB connection works, which should mean that the chip is working fine.... but I tried 2 different cables, the Java Uploader can't see the device period.
Unfortunately, the uploader can't flash the device via the USB port....and the damn thing only recognize master device if it is attached via USB.

Also, all these chipset probably works well with HDs, but ATAPI devices is a very hit and miss thing. On the other thread, I reported a INITIO 1430 base case that I just got. The drive is capable of hiting 30MB in CDSpeed burst rate test. So I was happy and attached my Pioneer 108A into it (the case wasn't really that well designed....) Guess what, it reads DVD fine, and get recognized, but Pioneer WON'T BURN via Firewire port.... it just stuck at lead-in and never came back....
So I put a LiteOn 812 rebadged Teach (the combo that was sale at Compugeeks), guess what,.... the drive reads and burns just fine....
Sorry for the long complain, but I what I am trying to say is that getting these enclosure to work with ATAPI device is really very hit and miss....

I just wish NEC would come out with an external version of the ND-3500A or at least think about the idea when 8x DVD+R DL becomes available Spring 2005. I've had good results with external enclosures as I mentioned before, but the downside is, they do cost more.

beach-hobo, you mentioned in the other thread "If your DVD drive is working correctly, better to leave everything alone and not FLASH the Case. I have heard of some people getting problems after they FLASHed to a newer version."

What I get here is, don't fix it if it ain't broken scenario. My question concerning this is, if the NEC ND-3500A inside the external enclosure w/ Prolific chipset burns DVDs around 12x, should I not worry about upgrading the FW for the Prolific Chipset in order to get the best results if that is possible (16x)?

Let's forget about the 12X and 16X Numbers.

Using Nero CD/DVD-Speed, if the Transfer Rate is over 22MB/s you can support 16X burns. If the transfer rate is lets say 19MB/s you will only support 12X period. This test applies to both the Firewire and USB ports...

Now the next item, the DVD discs you use to BURN must be good enough to reach the 16X number.

With Nero CD/DVD Speed, I assume it will be best to test with the USB2 & Firewire ports to see which one is better for the drive/enclosure combination, even though Firewire should give better results in the end. Also, for blank media, I'm planning to use Taiyo Yuden &/or Verbatim 8x DVD+R. Both produced very good results in the CDRinfo Review (http://www.cdr-info.com/Sections/Rev...10711&PageId=0.

One last thing, is it better to use a DVD/CD-RW drive to rip DVDs to your HDD (TEAC from my laptop) and have an another drive (NEC) to burn the discs. I read that it isn't good to rip with your DVD-RW all the time because the life expenctency of the drive is much shorter.

I have the Teac DW-28E in my laptop which is about 2 years old. I have been using it to rip DVD's for that whole time with no problems. And it turns out that it rips DVD's faster than my NEC 3500, even with rip lock removed. Like 16mins versus 28mins for the same DVD. So I plan on continuing to use my Teac to rip and my NEC to write. And I use two external firewire hard drives to rip the movie to and also when using programs like DVD Shrink. The program runs much faster because it reads from one hard drive and writes to another. When the same HD as to read and write at the same time, operations slow down a bit. Also I can continue to use my computer for other stuff as all the operations are running in the background and not using my main internal IDE laptop HD at all. And since firewire uses very little CPU versus USB, my CPU essentially remains free as well. Keep in mind I"m running a Pentium 4 3.2Ghz cpu in my laptop

I should clarify that any operations that are Disk I/O related like ripping, video demultiplexing/multiplexing, and writing don't affect my general computer use as much when using multiple hard drives and optical drive, all connected via the firewire bus. Of course when CPU tasks such as compressing/transcoding video is going on, that will affect general computer usability. But that's what P4 Hyper Threading is for.

NetSlider, do you think it would be better for me to keep my TEAC DVD/CD-RW drive that is currently in my laptop and get the NEC ND-3500A + enclosure, OR get the NEC ND-6500A and wait a year or so to get a better DVD-RW all together & have 2 DVD-RW writers (one to rip & one to burn). The only thing with the ND-6500A is, I 'may' have to upgrade the laptop's FW in order for the drive to recognize it. I have NO idea where to find this FW if it is needed.

At the moment, I rip my DVDs to one of my external drives since the main HD is down to 10gb. I guess when I purchase the DVD writer, I will have to use the same HDD to burn the discs to. Btw, I just found out last night that one of my switching converters that came with my WD Combo HDD (Rexon AC-005) no longer works. So far I only have one external drive instead of two in use. Anybody know where to find this converter?? I emailed WD abt it last night.

Well, a couple of things to consider. Such as:
-Do you want DVD writing capability in a portable package (internal laptop optical drive) or is sitting on your desktop in an external enclosure ok? For me having it sit on my desktop is fine for right now.

-Do you rip encrypted movies? (you don't have to answer that directly in a reply) If so, then your internal Teac is probably going to be faster (assuming you buy an NEC 3500 specifically). How fast do DVD rips take for you to complete now? You can test with DVD Decrypter or DVD Speed. Like I said it's about 15mins with my Teac and about 25-30 mins with my NEC.

-I'm not sure why you would need two DVD Writers. (besides being a computer geek) If you get the NEC 3500 it will be faster than the ND-6500A when it comes to writing DVD's and CD's, and it will be faster reading (besides the encrypted movie exception as noted above). And the 3500 will be cheaper and way easier to find. And there are a lot more custom firmware updates out there and it is more widely supported as is obvious in this forum.

As for the external WD Combo problem, I'm not sure what you mean by "switching converter".

NetSlider, most of the time my computer is sitting on my desk and I hardly ever take it on the road. Therefore, having an internal DVD writer on the go isn't really a top priority. It would be nice to have though. Like you said, the NEC ND-6500a is quite difficult to find in stock at that, more expensive than the ND-3500A, and less firmware upgrades.

The TEAC DVD/CD-RW drive has been doing a good job as of lately. Only recently have I been ripping DVDs to my HDD. I'll get back with you on how fast it takes to do both a 4.7gb & DL DVD. I'm pretty sure its within the time period yours takes, maybe a little slower since your computer specs are better than mine (1.5ghz Centrino/512mb ram).

A switching converter is basically a power supply to make my external HDD operate.

SL Disc (not a full 4.7gb) took around 14min, but a DL disc (7gb) was quite slow coming in at 45min. The fastest speed the TEAC can burn to HDD is between 2-3X.

Thanks for links to newsguy's 9/7/04 firmware! Prolific no longer has firmware available online.

I purchased the 3.5" BYTECC enclosure because it matched exactly an older 5.25" with my Pioneer A03. Unfortunately, the older one had 911 oxford chipset unlike the new 3.5" one. I did not have the Delayed Write problem with but I did manage to corrupt 100GB of files that I had just put onto the 250gb drive. It took a while, but I upgraded about 10 systems to where they all had 48bit addressing. This seems to have fixed the corruption problem which occured when I was consolidating files from several win2k & xp systems onto a 256gb external drive. I was unaware that even the latest SP for XP and Win2K do not enable 48bit addressing and suspect that was the cause of the data corruption.

FWIW, "FileScavenger" easily recovered 91gb of 100GB on a 250gb disk. I tested trial versions of both "GetDataBack NTFS" and "FileRecovery Pro" and found the much less expensive "FileScavenger" was far superior. There are some photos here http://stateson.net/pub/ that I used when communicating with tech support at the FileScavenger site. They identified the problem with the missing 48bit addressing after looking at the photos.