FireWire Depot Offers New, Faster Drive Enclosures

FireWire Depot has announced a set of new FireWire drive enclosures based on the recently released Oxford 911 chip. Offering vastly improved data transfer rates, the Oxford 911 chip eliminates the data bottleneck associated with older IDE based FireWire bridges. According to FireWire Depot:

FireWire Depot is proud to announce the next round of Oxford 911 enclosures.

In approx. two weeks we will be receiving the SK family of drive enclosures in both FireWire only and FireWire/USB combo enclosures using the Oxford 911 chip, and in both 2.5" and 3.5" enclosures.

Around the same date, we expect to receive BVT/BT 3.5" enclosures using the Oxford 911 chip. We will be offering an upgrade path for existing users who want to swap out their existing bridge boards for the new Oxford 911 based board. The details and specifics of this are not finalized, but watch the website for more information.

Prices are as follows:

  • SK 2.5" FireWire only - $129.99
  • SK 2.5" combo FW/USB - $139.99
  • SK 3.5" FireWire only - $139.99
  • SK 3.5" combo FW/USB - $149.99

We are accepting pre-orders for these enclosures with a projected ship dateof June 15th.

Preliminary tests show the following results:

  • 3.5" FireWire /w 7200rpm HDD: 26.5MB/sec(Write), 31.2MB/sec(Read)

You can find more information on the new drive enclosures at the FireWire Depot Web site.