[X4U] firewire hub

[Randy B.Singer]

Matt Gregory said:

>Any reason why you recommend the Argosy's
>other than price?


The Argosy case has a thick aluminum main body, not cheap plastic.  The 
aluminum case has two big advantages.  First, instead of requiring an 
internal (noisy) fan, the case is used as a large heat sink.  Second, 
since the case is thick, it helps muffle noise from the drive.  Combined 
with a quiet Seagate drive, this means that an external FireWire drive 
based on an Argosy case is whisper quiet.

The Argosy case uses the Prolific FireWire to IDE chipset.  Many say that 
the Oxford chipset is the best for FireWire hard drives, but it was 
drives with the Oxford chipset that were known to lose all of their 
users' data with the upgrade to OS X 10.3, and it was LaCie drives using 
the Oxford chipset that had similar problems with the upgrade to OS X 
10.4.  FireWire drives based on the Prolific chipset had no such problems.

The Argosy case can be assembled with only one screw!

The case is designed to sit on your desktop vertically, which means that 
it has a tiny footprint and that it takes up very little room on your 
desk.  (While you can't easily stack these drive cases, three of them 
arranged side by side take up about as much room as three stacked drives 
from another company.)

The AC adapter that comes with the Argosy case is not inside the case 
itself (so it doesn't cause a heat problem) and it isn't at the end of 
the power cord (no wall wart) which would mean that it would take up two 
places on your surge strip or UPS.  The AC adapter is inline with the 
power cord.

In sort, this kit is very well designed and extremely functional.  It 
also doesn't hurt that it is inexpensive for such a kit.




Randy B. Singer
Co-Author of: The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

Routine OS X Maintenance and Generic Troubleshooting
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html