Its cheaper to buy an internal hard drive and the enclosure compared to a pre-made external HDD .
Yeah, seen this posted several times, so I've spent ?? (a lot of time) researching (bad habit - stupid internet
: before the internet I could have just gone down to my favorite store, picked one out of the 2 they stocked, brought it home and usually would have been plenty satisifed). But, as a hardware enthusiast from the PC world, am use to researching every individual component I put into a system. From the case, MB, power supply, CPU, RAM, etc.etc. ad nauseum. However, since I did do the research, here it is, maybe save some other nerdy geek the time I spent trying to compare buying a single unit (MyBook, Maxtor OneTouch, Lacie, etc. vs an external enclosure and a hard drive).
Maybe, if you're looking for USB only or USB and 1394a. You can get this for $20 - $40 all day. You can find hundreds of enclosures (newegg currently has 317 at the 3.5" size). This is not the case if you want 1394b (FW 800) connectivity (less than 10%, a total of 3 out of the 317 single drive enclosures at newegg). At this time, it seems all the manufacturers are charging a premium for this connection. When you find one, the MSRP is ranging from about $120 - $180. Have only found 2 for under $100, with the least expensive being the Macally that lists at $149 for $65 at newegg. This puts the combo of the enclosure and a 500GB drive at a minimum $13 above the price of the MyBook with FW 800. Also, now have to deal with 2 manufacturers instead of 1 if something goes wrong.
Now, let's add to that enclosure the ability of putting an SATA drive rather than an IDE drive into it. We're talking "best" price of around $150 for that enclosure and less than 10% of the already less than 10% of the enclosures out there. Plus, when you do find an enclosure that has FW 800 and SATA internal connections, I've never heard of the manufacturer. And try to find a review or any information other than what the manufacturer has listed. Not gonna happen.
So, bottom line: if ya wanna go cheap, yeah, ya kin get a case and a 250 drive fer under a hunerd dollers. This'll save ya about $20-30 max. Ya wanna 500GB, FW 800, just look at the few that are set up fer ya already.
And still ain't made up muh mind on which 'un to git. (S'pose to be a smilie here, but don't none of em fit fer what oughtta go here.)