MiniBuddies External Drive Enclosure

Submitted by Lo Yuk Fai on Sun, 2006-07-16 04:18

After more than 3 years of storing everything on the notebook's drive and having virtually no backup at all. I bought in succeeding months an external DVD writer, and an external drive.

I've not much to say for the DVD writer, it was a NEC ND-4571A in a combo (i.e. USB + Firewire) enclosure codenamed CD-R4-U2FW using the Prolific PL-3507 chip. You may find some photos of them at the bottom of this page. The combined weight is substantial and the stability is in my opinions satisfactory, even in vertical position. Also, I flashed the firmware with the latest that was avaialable on the Prolific site.

By the way, I use DVD43, but it has problem running if no DVD drive is detected during startup (I only turn on the writer when I use it), so I installed Daemon Tools (a virtual CD program) as well.

For the external drive, it was a more complicated decision. First of all, read the USB drive time bomb over Dan's Data and you'll understand why I would want to find an external enclosure that *will* spin down the drive when it's not being used.

It turned out that the majority out there does NOT spin down, except for the NAS ones and some Mac Mini alike.

You may find a list of most of the the Mac Mini alike here at 123Macmini.com, note that not all of them will spin down the drive automatically.

Except for the M9 and LaCie, the rest are not locally available. The M9 is not particularly cheap, and couldn’t host the Seagate Barracudas, which I wanted to use. And the LaCie is not looking good without a Mac Mini sitting on it.

So I kept looking and found one marketed by a local company, that’s, the MiniBuddies.

The combo version uses Cypress AT2 and Oxford 911 chips, and it supports automatic spin-down when it’s connected via Firewire.

However, when I looked around the web for comments and reviews, which were scarce anyway, it seemed that its reputation is not that good. And emails enquiries regarding the issues I read on the web were never replied.

Still, I bit the bullet and bought a combo version (with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10), having no other choice in that price range.

So it was set up, the MiniBuddies was connected to the combo PC Card (with VIA chips), then the DVD writer to the MiniBuddies.

While it’s in my opinions that the MiniBuddies leaves much to be desired for its sub-par build-quality (check out the photos I took at the bottom of this page, and that the access light only works for a few times before giving up. It nonetheless works well and passed the dreadful 1394test.

I also tweaked here and there, and corrected the misspelling that was in the original firmware with the Oxford Firmware Uploader. (the MiniBuddies came with 4.0 firmware already installed)

However, problem came when I started the DVD writer, the drive and the writer just wouldn’t work reliably when both is on.

After spending hours to solve the problem by tweaking here and there, I gave up and switched to a Firewire PC Card with TI chip and the problem was gone.

*** Update on 2006-08-13 ***

I can't get the USB to work. Tried 2 different computers, 3 different USB hosts (2 USB 2.0 and 1 USB 1.1), drive set at Master or Cable Select, and Firewire cables connected or disconnected before turning on the drive, still Windows couldn't detect the drive correctly -- Exclamation mark in the Device Manager.

Just yet another quirk of the chip/drive/enclosure, or a combination of them...?

Anyway, since I intend to use mainly the Firewire connection, it's not a serious concern, but another nuisance that plague the problematic MiniBuddies.

*** End of update ***

Below you may find some screenshots of the Uploader.

Original MiniBuddies Settings, Windows Uploader Main Window, Java Uploader Basic Settings, Java Uploader Advanced Settings, Java Uploader