Multi Drive Enclosure

I

Idler

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 12, 2002
Messages
188
Hi, hope someone may be able to help me out with this question.. I have about 4, 200 to 250 gb IDE drives, I need to get them in an external setup, I got rid of my tower and am using a latop, but still want access to the storage space. Ideally I don't want 4 enclosures sitting around taking up space and power outlets, yes they can be chained with Firewire and take only one port on the computer but the space they take up will be an issue. Is there a USB or Firewire (preferred) encluosure that will house 3 or 4 drives at a time? Sutable for a home setup, I don't need an enterprise solution here, heh, I'd prefer to spend a little as possible, but I will spring for quality.

Thanks in advance,
Idler
 
Cooldrives.com has several solutions, from $180 to $320 and up. The second one linked doesn't look too bad. Note that the first is for 5.25" devices so you might need to get bays for the drives.

 
unhappy_mage said:
Cooldrives.com has several solutions, from $180 to $320 and up. The second one linked doesn't look too bad. Note that the first is for 5.25" devices so you might need to get bays for the drives.

Click to expand...

u_m, why do you have to continue to make me want more? man, you are going to be a money pit for me :p its a good thing i have no money atm because i would be spending it all right now
 
I use this to hold 4 IDE drives. They have several different models with various interfaces.
 
Sad thing is the price of the multi drive setups. I hate how they are so much more expensive then the single drive enclosures. I would personaly build a small computer as a server before I would drop 300 bucks on an firewire case as I could get it to do more but that is just me. If you are in the modding spirt maybe get a few firewire boards and a matx case and make your own with them daisy chained inside the box. You could make it cheaper and have options for more storage down the road.
 
I was looking at a similar solution myself.

Anyone know if these can be set up as raid 5 or 2 raid 1 pairs for redundancy?
Also right now i have a external case , and as long as it's on, the drive is spinning. Do these use any power saving features, or do the drives spin constantly..

Maybe I need to configure some settings for my external?
 
VladyLama said:
I was looking at a similar solution myself.

Anyone know if these can be set up as raid 5 or 2 raid 0 pairs for redundancy?
Also right now i have a external case , and as long as it's on, the drive is spinning. Do these use any power saving features, or do the drives spin constantly..

Maybe I need to configure some settings for my external?
Click to expand...

Most can't. Thats where my idea of a small fileserver for the same price comes in. You get a like p4 board and chip off the forms for like 100 bucks and a matx case or something that you can throw a few drives in. A cheap card and software raid 5 and your set. Spend a little more and get a hardware raid 5 card off ebay or something if you want to go all out.
 
In my case I use the 4 bay external to backup the important files on my 8x200 RAID 5 array. I don't backup music or dvds (can always re-rip stuff if needed), but all the digital video, photos, scanned records, financial stuff, etc. get backed up. I've recently added a hot swap tray to my external 4 bay enclosure so I can swap a 300GB drive off site for the most critical files. Once a year I snapshot the changes to the critical stuffs to DVD and store that offsite as well. I'd like to think this provides some disaster recovery but I've not had to test that theory yet...
 
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