What's the cheapest solution for my storage needs?

[marklight]

I have three 1TB hard drives that are in my mac pro and they're filled with media. I need to expand my storage space so I'm looking to move those hard drives out of the mac pro, and into a storage tower where I could also have other hard drives. I'd then connect this tower to my mac pro (obviously).

I know some people would recommend drobo, however I do not need to back up this data so I don't want to pay extra for that luxury, plus it only has four slots, and i'd like to have more hard drives than that- but it's not necessary. I could probably just do with 1 more TB.

[PlaceofDis]

if you just need one more TB why not just get one more drive and have it be external?

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5F136 Safari/525.20)

if you just need one more TB why not just get one more drive and have it be external?

Or put 1 more drive into the Mac Pro. It does have 4 drive bays, right, or do you have all four full? I'd just find an external drive as well if that's the case.

[marklight]

I want to have a separate media storage device, so I can free up the space in my mac pro for business stuff. Sorry should have said that.

[Tallest Skil]

Yes. I, too, am looking for something along these lines.

It needs to have a boatload of bays, accept SATA drives, and be available for purchase as just a shell (no installed drives, but whatever trays I might need).

And I don't want to be forced into RAID.

[VoR]

You could use an old pc and oss software like freenas/openfiler etc - or any os :)

[basesloaded190]

drobo? not cheap but does what you want

[PlaceofDis]

so basically something like this?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817332021