@dpcon said:

My OWC Mercury Elite failed after 8 months of very modest use so there you have it.

Well some drives do fail no matter what - most of the time it's just becuase you had the bad luck of the draw. Besides, OWC doesn't make the drives, they get the drives from Seagate, WD etc.

I had two drives die on me that were both under 24 hours of use old. One was in a Mercury Elite case (no fault of the case - I bought the drive new and installed it)

I was told by a guy that worked for IBM in their drive divsion that when they manufacture drives they expect about a 10% premature failure rate. That's right 10%. But they try to catch most of that 10% by doing a burn in period. Most drives that will fail do so within the first 50 hours of use. But some still get through and die long before they should. Generally, if your drive makes it through the first 50 hours, it should go the full lifespan with proper care. That's why I never embark on recording a major session or album onto a brand new drive until it's got at least 50 hours under it's belt. I learned that one the hard way.

Heat is also a major drive killer. Keeping drives in tight quarters without good ventilation will shorten the life of any drive.

Given that you don't happen to land one of the 10%, I've found that the OWC cases are a good way to go.

@Nick Batzdorf said:

Mm. Well, I have a FW enclosure from Granite Digital (made by Relax) that is, as they say in France, strictement pour les oiseaux.

It was expensive too, from the early days of FireWire. The sucker has never worked all that well, its shoddy plastic trays don't seat well and have since warped, and they want more than the price of a good new enclusure to replace the bridge board with one that sees drives over 160MB or whatever it is. Plus its light was connected by wire the same gauge as a hair, routed in the way when you install drives. Of course that broke long ago.

This is what we call a POS in the art world.

I never bought the granite because of the higher price, but I also know that a lot of the early firewire cases don't work as well as the newer ones. Some of my older cases won't take a drive bigger than 120gigs. And I had a few early cases bought from MacMall and other places that were down right useless. The bridges were so bad that just getting the drives to mount half of the time was a battle. I ended up chucking a few cases early on.