Jeremy; I use the AMS Venus DS3 hard drive enclosures. I've bought them from several vendors over the years, including MicroCenter in St. David's, PA. (Their website doesn't show them anymore, but they always seem to have them in-store).

Google the name, and you'll find a lot of vendors online, including this one:

http://www.unityelectronics.com/product-product_id/4325

The AMS enclosures come in several flavors; EIDE and SATA, plus some are USB-only, some are both FW & USB. The dual-config versions are worth the slightly extra cost, IMHO, because you have both options in a pinch. Of course, you'll want to read the descriptions carefully before you order one.

I recently bought two more of the EIDE FW/USB model; I have two live/remote HD enclosures, plus two "open" units at each of my studio workstations, so I never have to "pop the top" on my DAWs anymore.

With the Firewire 400 and USB 2.0 outs, you have the best of both worlds, depending on what ports are filled up at the time. I've found little or no differnce in speed/throughput for the USB 2 vs the Firewire ports, but I HAVE found some occasional conflicts with FW devices, so if that happens, I put the recording devices on the FW and the HD's on the USB ports and everyone's happy.

They're a cool-looking stealth-black, and they're cheap enough to have several on hand, in case something fails. I did lose one or two over the years to various failures, but kept the covers and power supplies, so I have lots of extra parts. I keep a dedicated power supply in my gig rack, so I simply pull out the laptop and HD enclosure from my personal gig-bag, plug in the cables already waiting in the rack, and off I go, literally in seconds.

Conversely, when I get back to the studio, I simply plug the enclsure into the cables waiting on top of my DAW, and I'm up and running quickly...

BTW, Jeremy, I picked up the Fireface 800 over the weekend, your experience with it pushed me over the edge. I'll let you know how much I like it soon! 8-)

Cool.

Thanks Joe.

Although, I should mention that I'm actually looking for the card that plugs into the PCMCIA slot on the laptop that gives a laptop firewire capabilities.

Something along the lines of:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16839150005

Enjoy the Fireface! You'll love it.

Ooops! :oops: Completely missed the mark on your question...duh!

For what it's worth, I had to replace/upgrade my Sony Vaio laptop, and got a new one, complete with Vista and the new XpressCard Slot. (No more PCMCIA cards for Sony!) Believe it or not, 3rd party vendors are already making plenty of XpressCards with all kinds of configs, including two firewire slots, so I was up and running with FW in no time. (Sony also has the less-reliable 4-pin FW connections onboard, called i-Link, as well.)

I'm finally cozy-ing up with Vista, and aside from some new-relationship jitters and first-date glitches, it's working out. So far. Stay tuned. :wink:

i got several Siig i would love to get rid of!

Scott
ADK

ADK audio wrote: i got several Siig i would love to get rid of!

Scott
ADK

I just now caught this with my recent/similar post regarding ExpressCard FW options.

Do you mean to say that you want to get rid of them because they're crap, or you want to get rid of them because you have them and want to reclaim the profit??

If the former...nah - keep em.

If the latter - get me some prices on the newer ExpressCard version and I'll call you!

J.