4 bay external enclosure

Hi all..

I have been looking for a 4 disk sata external enclosure. I tried the drobo and it failed miserable. Won't be using that one. I have two 500 gig and two 300 gig sata that I would like to put into an external enclosure for back up and storage purposes.

I have a Mac pro 08. I have looked at the eSata solutions, but I don't know enough about them. I would ideally like something I can put my disks in and connect via usb/firewire and be done with it.

Price range is about $500-$600. Any suggestions? Or has anybody else done this and if so what are you using?

Thanks

TorchElCreep

Thank you for the link, I have been looking at newegg but I didn't come across this one. This looks good!!!!

Genyus

I agree, I wanted one, but I cannot find one that is disk less which just sucks.

Sorry....

Looking for a enclosure that will let me connect it to my computer either via firewire, network, eSata. Must be able to support 4 drives that are not all the same. IE 2 500gig and 2 300 gig. Hope this makes sense. Just a box that I connect to my system for storage. Not going to be running programs or rendering off of it. Just want it to put files on. Sonnet looks a little out of my price range.

Drobo, I had it for three days, worked on it for the whole three days, spent 4-5 hours on the line with there tech support. The big issue I had was this. With the drobo, if your system goes to sleep the drobo goes into standby mode, not a problem. The problem happens when you wake the computer up, the drobo will not wake up. You will get a flashing green light at the bottom of the drobo. Once you get that you have to shut down the drobo, shut down your computer and restart them both. Only, the drobo will not restart. You will get the flashing green light again. What you then have to do is pull out your disks and rebuild the drives. Which in my case I lost data once, the other times it rebuilt itself with any issues, thank god this was only test data, but lost the data non the less.

If you are like me and leave your computer on and put it into sleep mode this will kill the drobo. Tech support basically said, if you are going to be puttying your computer into sleep mode then you need to put your drobo into standby mode, turn off your computer, then turn off your drobo then restart your computer to put it into sleep mode?!?!?! WTF. What is funny, I did this on the phone with tech support. I then started up the drobo just to make sure it would start up and it didn't. I had to rebuild all the drives. The lady on the phone didn't know what to do. I then called back again, they were closing by this time and had the exact same thing happen on the phone with a different tech. This doesn't seem to be as big an issue when using windows, but on the Mac side you will see lots of posts about this. I sent mine back after three days of dealing with this. I wasn't going to trust my data to something that might start back up.


If you visit the drobo forums you will find many similier posts and concerns. The product it self, when it is running is great. I just did not want to have to hassle or worry about my data if my computer goes into sleep mode.

Torch...

The one you suggested is looking more and more like a go.

Thank you for the link and thank you to everyone else with there suggestions.

R~

Torch..

Just ordered the one from newegg. Will let you know how how it works. Don't know if you are looking for one also or have been thinking about buying one.

Torch

Setup it up in about 20 minutes. Put the hard drives in and I was off and running. The software documentation and booklet that comes with it plain out suck. But it is pretty darn easy to setup. I have had zero issues with it. My system goes to sleep, the enclosure goes to sleep. I wake up my computer the drives wake up. There is a little lag time but it wakes up with no problems.

I actually upgraded two of my drives so I now have 4 500gig drives in place.

The user software is pretty straight forward to use and it is easy to setup the raid if you want a raid solution.

I found my solution and works great! Thank you for the link! Just what I was looking for!

If only there was one of these with a FW connector, I would be all over it ..

Got 3x320GB drives I'd like to put into a single housing, but can't put an eSATA on my Macbook

Click to expand...

I hear yeah, if you have a Mac Pro, this is great. I don't know your price range but mine was pretty limited didn't want to spend a "ton" of money if you know what I mean. If you have a wired/wireless solution you might want to look into one of the NAS boxes. They ended up being more then I wanted to spend since I could do the esata thing and I didn't "have" to have it networked, so this worked out great.

I wasn't able to find one with firewire or usb in this price range that would hold this many drives. I agree I can see a market for this, even if it is just a place to load hard drives up with raid etc. Just for the use of the drives.