The solution that you proposed uses 2.5" drives, which are currently shipping in the range of 750 GB to 1.5 TB per spindle.

The single drive enclosure that Rob proposed and I use supports one 3.5" disk but those disks are readily available in 4 TB sizes at a reasonable price.

All that being said, I look at thousands of 2.5" drives every day.



This is about 1/4 racks worth.

Does anyone else see the now-popular trayless designs as being very dangerous? Handling a hard drive and touching the circuit board on the bottom, perhaps even bumping several together or (perish the thought) dropping one from even a few inches?

Putting a drive in a tray of some sort, especially one with a very sturdy carrying handle, would seem to be a no-brainer, especially if the tray provided some shock protection.

“Does anyone else see the now-popular trayless designs as being very dangerous?”

I don’t. Based on my experience so far, I could probably wear the paint off the sides of the drive before I caused a problem with ESD. So far, I haven’t dropped one. When not in the machine, I keep them in the original anti-static bag that they came in originally.

The most annoying thing about my trayless enclosure is the spring that drags along the top of the drive to keep it aligned to the SATA and power connecters. I put a note card on the label side to keep the drive from getting scratched.

I still have some IDE trays...

"Putting a drive in a tray of some sort, especially one with a very sturdy carrying handle, would seem to be a no-brainer, especially if the tray provided some shock protection."

Well, the term "tray" is being used very loosely. They are not really trays but more like a set of bolt on tracks. Most of these "trays" still very much expose the pc board. That being the case, there really isn't any real advantage to trays.

The trayless on the other hand gives you fast hot swappable ability without have to pull out screw drivers. I merely open the door, pull the drive, and slide another one in.

These are kind of cool.

ORICO 6205SS
http://www.amazon.co.uk/ORICO-6205SS-BK-3-5inch-Internal-Enclosure/dp/B00GD99KXU

"Does anyone else see the now-popular trayless designs as being very dangerous? Handling a hard drive and touching the circuit board on the bottom, perhaps even bumping several together or (perish the thought) dropping one from even a few inches?"

No problems here - I handle bare drives daily and often drop them as much as an inch as I shuffle through my drives in a drawer. Haven't lost one yet. Ten years ago I would have handled my drives much more carefully, but today's drives are remarkably robust.

And in a few years, you will be using SSD's only as the price is approaching $1 per Gb. Rotating iron-oxide discs are just below $1 per Gb on average.

got rid of my bays in favour of usb3 externals.

have raid internally for working projects, but store everything on externals now.

My archiving is similar to ushere's. (;
I my boot disk is SSD and work off 3 disk RAID 5 internals and use these dual external drive docks to archive.

http://www.amazon.com/SuperSpeed-Duplicator-Docking-Station-Support/dp/B00MHNSQH2

They are always off except when I'm retrieving or archiving data.

Most of the outboard RAID units we have in our server room have hot-swappable trays. Not sure why anyone would think a tray automatically means its not hot-swappable.

I wouldn't worry about handling the bare drives either. I've seen my interns do a lot of incredibly stupidly nasty things to drives such as dropping them, sticking them in their pockets, tossing them on desks, spilling things on them, even when powered ... and they just keep on ticking. It takes a huge force (some are rated to withstand over 500Gs!) to damage them. When we did a major clean out last year i found a bunch of 20--80GB drives with nothing worthwhile on them. To safeguard against data theft we decided the should all go to the dump in a physically damaged state. We tried throwing them onto the concrete loading dock hard enough to have them bounce across the lot into the dumpster, often with severe dents. Quite a few of them were still functional after that. Pretty much took a couple of heavy duty slams with a sledgehammer to guarantee brokenness.

Capacity-wise, all other things being equal, the platters from a 5.25" drive have about 2.5x the surface area of 3.5" drives. I'd also guess a standard half-height enclosure could easily hold 5 platters as compared to a max of 3 in a 3.5' drive. This means that using the same storage as a 4TB 3.5", a 5.25" should hold 16.67GB. Yes, i know the drive would have to run slower and the seek times would be longer, but heck, even at that they'd still be 50 times faster than when 5.25" drives were the norm. I'm surprised the drive industry hasn't jumped at the chance to offer 16TB drives when a lot of desktop users still have empty 5.25" bays that could be filled!

If you don't mind changing the internal arrangement some, the case for a 5.25" drive could hold two spindles of 2.75" platters, in opposite corners. This would increase the surface area another 1.68x resulting in 28GB in a single drive. Or, if you're a little more conservative, it could be an "internal" RAID1 with each spindle duplicating the other for double reliability while still holding 14GB.

Why aren't drive manufacturers making these?