After all the trouble I had with various hard drive enclosures earlier, I’ve finally found one that works well: the Antec MX-100. No problems at all with reliability, speed, or physical construction quality with it so far.
I ordered two, so that I can finally put my offsite backup plan into effect. They’ll each have the same size hard drive in them, formatted as an encrypted filesystem and set up to be the same mount point, but only one of them will be hooked up at a time. The daily backup script will sync everything to the drive, and then once a month or so I’ll disconnect the drive, swap in the other one, and take the old drive to the office and stick it in a desk drawer. That way I’ll be covered even if fire, theft, or some other catastrophic event takes out my system and the currently-attached backup drive at the same time.
Unfortunately they only support SATA drives, and I still have a couple of 500GB and 750GB PATA drives that are still perfectly good, so maybe I’ll throw them into the gaming box. Or put one in one of the sucky old enclosures and hook it up to the PS3. Or play Frisbee…
My Antec MX-100 ready light goes out and cannot boot from drive without cycling power on ANTEC box. WD 500gb sata drive.
Why does ready drop???
I have 3 MX-100 with West Dig 200gb & 500GB and Maxtor 300gb. At times the drive spins down and i Have power off/on the enclosure to wake the drive up. This happens sometimes at boot and other times when Either Win XP or Linux is running ! Why does the white light on the front of enc. go out???
I haven’t seen that happen on my system yet; they’ve been rock-solid for me so far. Make sure the power cord is securely plugged in, I guess, in case there’s something tugging at it and intermittently breaking the connection.