Home > Consumer Reviews > Macally PHR-250CC FireWire 400/USB 2.0 2.5-Inch IDE Hard Drive Enclosure

I use this enclosure with my (previously internal) 40GB Toshiba drive. Works just fine with Mac OS 10.3. Mounts the drive automatically (mounts all partitions, if multiples). I used Carbon Copy Cloner to backup my main harddrive and it takes about 30 mins for roughly 20 GB (includes a repair permission).

Installation of the drive was easy. It comes with one (1) Firewire cable and two (2) USB cables. The second one is to be used as a power supply, in case the primary USB connection doesn't supply enough power.

Very pleased so far.

I bought three of these drive enclosures and am using them with 2 Seagate 5400 / 100GB drives and one Hitachi 5400 / 80GB drive. The enclosures are well constructed and seem to work fine. But, there are two drawbacks that keep me from awarding 5 stars. 1) They are slightly larger (and therefore slightly less portable) than some enclosures I have used in the past. 2) The drives require a normal USB connection plus an additional USB port for a power cable (included with the enclosure). Other enclosures I have used were able to get sufficient power from the main USB connection.

I had to replace a Hitachi Travelstar 80Gb hard drive in my PowerBook G4. (used a Seagate Momentus which worked fine). I needed an interface for the Hitachi to connect it to the Powerbook to retrieve my old files (80 Gb is a lot of typing). The Macally device worked with the Hitachi drive (using Firewire AND USB -- I tried both -- Firewire wasn't as big an improvement as I had hoped). Bottom line: I got my data back with minimal expense, minimal hassle, and a simple direct connection. -a happy customer..

I used the enclosure with a Toshiba laptop hard drive and it is faster enough for me to edit DV over firewire if the drive is fairly empty. General file transfers over firewire are fast and USB transfers seem to be too. I can power it from the Firewire port on my MacBook Pro with the drive I used if I need to, some faster drive will more than likely need additional power. But I usually use the USB power connection anyway. The activity/power LED is very bright, this could be annoying to some, but I am okay with it.

The enclosure is rugid and well designed. The hard disk controller on my labtop died. I put my hard drive into the enclosure and boot from it (FireWire only on Mac). It works great! The drive goes to sleep when it is supposed to. It gets its power from the FireWire cable (so no need for an extra clumsy power supply). FireWire connection is Fast enough to use as a system disk. Love it. Highly recommend it (much better than one by CompUSA)

The only drawbacks are cosmetic:
1) the blue indicator light is way too bright. So bright, it hurts my eyes to look at it.
2) the case is too industrial looking - more of a tough man's toy, not a pretty girl's toy.
3) it does not match my laptop - it is silver, my laptop is white.