by: George Starcher, Associate Editor

My dad couldn’t think of what to get me for Christmas. So he asked for a suggestion. Well I had a 250GB Sata drive sitting idle in a cheap compusa sata USB carrier that had a tendency to corrupt any data going to the drive. So I wanted to be able to use the drive to clone my iMac 24″ internal drive. That way if I have a failure I can reboot my iMac on the external clone until I can get a repair done.

Today I received Part#OWCMEFW924AL1K It looks great. It is very well tooled aluminum. It uses starheaded screws so they have to include a startipped tool so you can open the unit. They also include usb, eSata, firewire 400 and firewire 800 cables.

The case is so well fitted that it took me a minute or two to slide the cover off and another minute to get it back on. No shoddy loose fitting work on this chassis. It has no fan since the chassis itself serves to dissipate the heat. Let me tell you. Once you plug in a firewire 800 cable and kick off Carbon Copy Cloner you will laugh at the idea of using USB2 ever again. Can we sum it up with 53GB is just over an hour? I like the chassis so much I may actually have to buy a new Sata hard drive, keep the clone in a bag in a safe just so I can use the chassis all the time not just when I clone my iMac.

The unit ran $110 USD. Sure you can get external hard drives complete for that price or less. But if you have a good drive and want a solid enclosure with a quality chipset and your choice of interfaces you should consider this unit.