external hard drive enclosure

I've been looking at external hard drive enclosures as a pretty affordable way to have a fairly reliable backup of my internal hard drive. I've seen tons of different enclosures out there including one from Macally that looks good as well as one that was in a thread here recently (I forget which thread, by I seem to think SRD was posting in it).

My question is this...are all the hard drive enclosures pretty much the same or are there significant differences between different brands? Also...is it true that USB2.0 is nearly as fast as 1394?

I was also looking at networkable enclosures, but it seems to me that they are considerably more expensive and much slower at data transfer. Is that true or am I misinformed?

Thanks,
Erik

 

USB 2.0 is faster, on paper, but it's speed can flunctuate from max to min, so it's hard to say. 1394, Firewire, is more constant, so at times its faster, at others, its slower.

 

Erik,
Asus' WL-HDD has been out for a year and half and it's an awesome little unit for under $100. Basically, it's a g access point, but you can put a 2.5" drive in it and it has features galore like to use it as an ftp server... but it's nice to have wireless secured storage...... customers who plan on throwing different hard drives in their ensembles have been picking that little unit up for a year or more now..

 

I have extensive use in both. I have about 6 external enclosures in use right now on one of my servers. USB 2.0 like posted above is better on paper. In reality it gets bogged down everytime with large transfers. Takes longer to access etc. Use firewire whenever possible. And if possible use a sata external drive with an sata card in the pc. the only plus to a network one is you can just throw it on a router and it can be accessed by other pcs. but if you just connect a regular enclosure to a pc you can just share the drive. newegg has a ton of enclosures. the macally ones are very good.

http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/SubCategory.asp?SubCategory=92