External RAID for Laptop?

A

Aqua_Geek

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 21, 2002
Messages
226
I am a film student in need of some sort of large external storage for my MacBook Pro. I am looking for some suggestions on what to get. I was thinking about getting a 2.5" external enclosure with eSATA connector and then picking up a SATA ExpressCard to connect it to my comp.

I know the 2.5" hard drives are more expensive and the capacity is nowhere near that of the 3.5", but I like the idea of being able to bring it with me when needed. The other option would be to go with a standard 3.5" enclosure, which would allow me to have a higher capacity HD or even a multi-bay enclosure, providing hot-swap capabilities and even RAID.

Any thoughts?
 
Wow. Don't know how I missed that. Know of anything a bit smaller, say with 2 drives? Though, it'd probably be smaller (not to mention cheaper and greater storage capacity) to just go with a 3.5" one and stick a 500GB HD in it, neh?

Do you recommend any eSATA enclosures? I really don't want to fork out $100 for the card, $100 for the HD and ANOTHER $100 for the enclosure on top of that.
 
What if I wanted to build an external RAID enclosure myself? I realize that it would be a lot of work, but is it viable?
 
I have this...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822155003

with 2 Samsung 400mb dirves in raid 1. May not be exactly what you're looking for but it has worked well for me. This is a NAS (Network attached storage). To me it's a lot more flexable because you can access the drive from any computer, but it will not be as fast as a sata or usb enclosure. Check it out and do some research on all your options before you buy. There's nothing worse than buying something and finding out it's a piece of dreck or it won't do what you need it to.
 
After thinking it over, it would probably be more cost-effective to build my own NAS box than a eSATA one. If it had Gigabit ethernet, the theoretical transfer speed would still be above what the HD can push out anyway, right? Not to mention that I could access the NAS from any of my machines without having to buy a special card.

So, now my question is does anyone know of any good Nano-ITX mobos that have:
1. Gigabit ethernet
2. SATA (preferably with hardware RAID 5)

Any other comments/insights would be greatly appreciated.
 
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