Large External Enclosures (Esata)

S

shizdan

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 30, 2007
Messages
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I'm looking for an External Enclosure to house my 3 External HDD's through Esata. Is this possible?

*Not looking for raid either* I'd rather see them seperate.
 
That is quite possible, and should not be expensive. The main decision you have to make is if you are OK with a SATA repeater, which will split the Esata bandwidth between the drives in the enclosure. If this isn't a problem because you use the drives for backup, then there are lots of cheap enclosures that will fit your needs. If you want full 3.0GB/sec bandwidth for each drive, that gets more expensive.

to clarify - repeater = 3.0GB/sec total bandwidth
dedicated link = 3.0/sec for each drive.
Venus T4S - this is a dated example, but do some searching, and you'll find newer versions.
 
FireWire2 said:
Look at this tray-less enclosure, it does save time and money
Click to expand...

No offense, but that's damn expensive!

OP, take a look at Sans Digital. Possibly this product. As styx0r said, your probably going to be looking at going with a port multiplier solution. You can get a direct link external enclosure (4 bays with 4 individual eSATA connectors, or 1 multilane connector), but then you would need an eSATA port on your computer for each drive (or a RAID or non-RAID HBA with an external multilane connector).
 
What about getting this

Link

and throwing in 4 2tb HDD's and hooking it up through one Esata cable....I called Alienware and they said it should support port multiplier...
 
FireWire2 said:
are you kidding me? $464.00 - A five drive REAL hardware raid? where can you get a hardware raid this cheap?


Sans Digital and other just a PM ware box...It is not the same

Opps, sorry... shizdan did not need the RAID .. My bad!

Here is it:
http://www.cwol.com/serial-ata/5-bay-sata-port-multiplier-encl-sbox-ptl.htm

**
Click to expand...
That unit makes me laugh. The quality on that thing is pretty bloody awful. You seem to keep linking to some random sellers with odd hardware. Do you have an interest in them? It seems every one of your posts is advertising one.
 
You seem to keep linking to some random sellers with odd hardware. Do you have an interest in them? It seems every one of your posts is advertising one.
Click to expand...
:D

I just said the same thing in another post. :D
 
I actually bought one and mod that to a NAS with FreeNAS.. Love it

Thinking of posting the process of make the NAS out of it.

It seems everyone used too high cost raid array for home

**
 
Last edited:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/RAID/Desktop/

I rather like the OWC case, very compact, quiet (after initial rampup) and has hardware raid5 - speed is about 200mb/s read 80mb/s write. However if you plan to use eSATA most likely you need to buy a SATA 6.0g HBA as it seems most SATA 3.0g HBAs have issues with volumes greater than 2TB. (no luck w/ ICH10R ports)

I've been able to use the highpoint rocket 622 successfully, but I had to avoid using drivers and just use the generic AHCI driver for it to recognize >2TB drives.

If your mobo has USB3.0 that might be a better option, but AFAIK there's no multibay USB3.0 box widely available yet.

If you just want a multibay w/ direct eSATA connections, you can find cheaper solutions at e.g. addonics or datoptic. I wasn't too impressed with their build quality though.
 
shizdan said:
What about getting this

Link

and throwing in 4 2tb HDD's and hooking it up through one Esata cable....I called Alienware and they said it should support port multiplier...
Click to expand...

Cheap and probably a bit slow but should be ok assuming that you're using the onboard eSATA port of your motherboard.

Wait, Why'd you call Alienware for? Is your PC built by Alienware or something?
 
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