please recommend a raid5 external enclosure.

T

theinv

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 17, 2008
Messages
216
Can anyone recommend a good external enclosure for raid5 setup? My requirement is it needs to support at least 5 or more drives.

I will use this box for photo/video editing, so read/write speed is important. Is eSATA interface fast enough or I should go with SAS. I plan to use a Areca card with two external mini-SAS port.

Thanks.
 
Last edited:
A SAS controller won't be compatible with a eSATA port multiplier enclosure.

I have had decent luck with our Enhance JBOD at work. It has 2 SFF-8088 ports. Its a dumb JBOD, with no expanders or anything.
 
If you're willing to go with a 4 bay one, I rather like this enclosure:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/RAID/Desktop/
The raid is handled by the box itself so you don't need a raid card.

Problem is hooking it up to your rig. I had problems connecting it by eSATA to the Intel ICH ports on my motherboard (it would get recognized, but would work really slow / not at all). My Adaptec SAS card would freak out if I tried connecting it there too. I suspect because it presents itself as 1 big drive, if it's >2TB the chipset doesn't know what to do with it. Right now I have it connected by Firewire 800 to my iMac 27 inch and it works pretty well there. (I tried Firewire 400 to my PC and it didn't work.)
 
theinv said:
why do you say it is a dumb JBOD? Shouldn't it depends on your controller card? If you use a raid card, you can do raid on it, right?
Click to expand...

By dumb JBOD, I mean that the enclosure doesn't do anything beyond hold the drives and allow for the possibility of hotswap. There's no RAID, enclosure management or anything fancy. If you use a RAID card, then you can use RAID. If you have a standard HBA, you can use Software RAID or JBOD.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top