I got some nice looking external hard disk enclosures last year, and have been struggling with them since then. Ultimately it was a chipset problem.

They were using the infamous Prolific chipset which often resulted to inconsistencies in performance. One day they’d be working fine. The next, they wouldn’t mount. Sometimes you’d have to power-cycle them to get them working again. Other times, you’d have to take them apart and massage the cables a little (I have no idea why this would work, but I was out of options and tried it – and it worked) Sometimes if it wouldn’t load on USB, switching to IEEE1394 would solve it.

They were more reliable in Windows than they were in the Mac. If your machine goes to sleep with them connected, don’t expect them to wake up along with it.

A few days ago, I decided to replace them with these babies:

What I’ve learned from my experience is that what you really have to worry about when dealing with enclosures is how they recover from “power-down” scenarios. These can take place in a couple of different situations:

1. The host machine powers down/sleeps, ergo the enclosure may power down with it. If it does, will it power up properly when you simply turn the host back on? (obviously this wasn’t the case with the Prolific chipsets)
2. The enclosure powers-down after long idle time to save power or lengthen the lifespan of the HDD. If the enclosure isn’t in use for a long period, it’s understandable for it to shut down, even when the host machine is still active. The question now would be if you suddenly click on your drive, will it power back on and resume operation normally? Again, my old enclosures would either hang the Mac, or unmount inappropriately.

After describing my concern (especially with Mac compatibility), my TipidPC “suki” was kind enough to leave me with an enclosure to test over the weekend. I thoroughly tried doing anything that would’ve made my older enclosures hiccup, and they performed beautifully.

After confirming everything was in order, I immediately ordered 3 more.

The enclosures have a lot of good things going for them:

1. Aluminum casing – You know how much of a sucker I am for Aluminum
2. Great design – The only beef I have with the design are: the huge-assed LED in front, the ugly fonts used for some of the etched writing,¹ and of course, the big-assed ASTONE logo etched on the side.
3. Power switch – Often cheap enclosures (and these are considered cheap mind you) just come with a plug which powers on the unit once you plug it in.
4. The internal IDE cables actually come with “pull-wires” which makes you easily detach the cable without pulling the cable itself.

Overall, it was a well thought out piece of cheap equipment – and they look damn sexy to boot.

But going back to the LEDs, what you see in the picture above is the “color” when turned on. It’s actually silver/colorless when off – which looks fine… until you turn it on again. So in true DIY² fashion, I took again my trusty black duct tape and cut out some covers for it. Here’s how they turned out:

Now when on, there’s a nice blue glow on the outer-rims of the said black “covers” much more restrained and elegant.

I was actually supposed to use the regular (silver) duct tape for obvious reasons, but the black one simply had the better surface texture (it doesn’t “crumple” like the silver one does). I was also severely tempted to sand the whole aluminum surface just to get the dismal laser-etched logos/text off; but it would void the warranty – so I just opted to live with it.

I will end this post with something completely irrelevant to the enclosures,³ but connected to the post title

After upgrading to my MBP, I finally had the time to do what I usually did with my powerbook before; which was to customize my bootup screen:

Let’s see if you can spot the difference from the default screen… there are about 4 of them.