I was really hoping to find a bus-powered Firewire hard drive enclosure for my old 60 GB Seagate drive (recently yanked from my aging Quicksilver G4 tower).

Lots of Googling turned up two results.

1) Lots of people think Firewire doesn't carry enough juice to power a 3.5" HDD.

2) Apparently these guys figured it out and then... decided it wasn't such a good idea? Not really sure, but their enclosures are discontinued; a shame, since their solution was both attractive and what I was looking for.

I really wanted a drive enclosure that would live at home 90% of the time, but could be portable if need be, and bus power is obviously nice since I would only have to lug around the drive (without the wall wart power supply) in addition to my laptop. Oh well, no such luck.

So, I settled on one of these. Decent 60GB bus-powered 2.5" Firewire portables (of the likes of those from Smartech, such as their Firelite series) run $60+, so I figured I could live with slightly less portability in Macally's option for $33.