OT: 4 Drive (SATA) External FW Enclosure

gdstaples wrote on 11/27/2005, 10:50 PM
I am looking for an external enclosure that will hold 4 SATA drives with Firewire connection to PC and preferrably hotswap drive caddies for under $350. Any ideas or recommendations? Any types to avoid?

I searched the archives but saw nothing on 4 drive enclosures but did see some info posted by DSE about volume corruption etc.

Thanks,
Duncan

Comments

Bill Ravens wrote on 11/28/2005, 5:55 AM
www.weibetech.com
get your wallet out.
gdstaples wrote on 11/28/2005, 7:56 AM
Thanks, I saw where they carry RAID solutions but could not find any external enclosures. I have 10 - 300GB SATA drives that I want to use in an external enclosure and need an enclosure only, not a pre-configured system as it appears Weibetech offerrs. They are neat looking systems.

Duncan
farss wrote on 11/28/2005, 11:29 AM
How do you want those 10 drives to appear to the OS, as 10 drives or as one drive.
One solution would be to put them all into a cheap PC with a server like case and access them through a network, 1Gb networks are faster than 1394.
Bob.
gdstaples wrote on 11/28/2005, 3:51 PM
I want to use 4 drives at a time in basically a two raid system. I want two of the 300s to mirror the other two and only expect to see one 600GB drive. Obviously I want to create two of these systems.

Duncan
farss wrote on 11/28/2005, 9:09 PM
I think most SATA RAID controllers will let you do that, all you're doing is creating a mirrored drive where each 'drive' is two HDs in RAID 0. Cheapest way might be to roll your own using another PC on a network. All off the shelf bits so it's cheap. Use a1Gb network switch and you're set.
For even more redundancy run two such boxes as mirrored servers.
Although you might do better using RAID 5 as if something hiccups it keeps working, you get a speedup, more storage capacity and bumpless fault handling.
Bob.
ottowr wrote on 11/28/2005, 10:06 PM
http://www.usb-ware.com/4-bay-hot-swap-raid-kit.htm shows what I think you're after.

There are a number of boxes around that wiould do the job, search for +raid +external +sata and you'll find plenty of choices.
gdstaples wrote on 11/28/2005, 10:54 PM
Many thanks all.

Duncan
FuTz wrote on 11/29/2005, 1:15 AM
You could have a try at Tigerdirect.com too.