Sounds extremely specific, but in a way I can't see why such a product
wouldn't be the standard
Because being less picky tends to result in much lower cost.
If you have the USB and/or firewire interface to the system,
what will it matter if SATA or PATA drive inside? Could be
anything, so long as you can find a replacement drive if the
present one fails... but if the present one fails you have
to wonder why it failed, and if making important backups or
other data stores, whether it might be more prudent to try
another model of enclosure next time.
Further, everyone is on a kick to have quieter encosures,
those that are fanless seem quite popular. By keeping the
PSU external you reduce the amount of heat produced inside,
and since small brick switchers are essentially a commodity
item and reduce the size of the external (whole
drive/product) case needed, may also be cheaper to make as a
finished product. It also means that should your supply
fail, you have a reasonable chance of getting a replacement
instead of a great amount of research trying to find a
drop-in replacement with same form-factor at much higher
cost, or having the budget or ability to do a repair on the
internal supply.
The typical internal supply these days is crap on anything
but the high cost products. Might run a couple years, we
won't know about current generation products for a little
while longer, but they're certainly not made as well for the
consumer market as they used to be for SCSI external HDD or
tape drives, etc.
- external drives are about flexibility
Seems more like they're about portability or lack of time or
space to install an internal. If you want flexible, it need
not support 1394 since there's practically nothing that
supports 1394 but not USB. Maybe some old Apple stuff
without USB2, but you're already talking about a potentially
high priced enclosure so a USB2 card is a trivial expense on
a per-system, as needed basis.
(so
USB+1394), SATA is the new format, and what's the point of having that
power brick externally?!
See above, and you seem to be presuming you don't have the
other option but you do... it merely costs more for a decent
product, and like all more costly products where the average
consumer can't adequately discriminate what more they're
getting for their dollar (capacity alone seems to be the
largest factor in addition to the brand if they have a
personal preference), they'll tend to pay less if they can't
justify the gain from spending more.
I found some units, in prices ranging from $60 to $100 - compared to
$20-50 for units with less features - and that's even without a
built-in AC adapter, and most looke shady anyway. Maybe you know
better?
You have to take it on a product by product basic, instead
of trying to lump all the factors together as you have.
One thing I don't care about is an external SATA interface.
It's usually higher performance than firewire or USB2. If
you want versatile rather than high performing, maybe you
don't really need USB or firewire at all, a gigabit NAS
enclosure might be more flexible, providing it isn't some
kind of proprietery interface that requires a windows driver
on client systems.
