Enclosure for multiple "types" of Disks (SATA, ATA, etc)

Discussion in 'Buying Tips and Advice' started by sparker, Apr 4, 2008.

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  1. sparker, Apr 4, 2008

    sparker macrumors newbie

    Joined:
    Mar 19, 2006
    Location:
    Colorado
    #1
    A quick question:

    Over the last few years, I've bought various external drives/enclosures. I have 4 2.5" drives (both ATA and SATA), and a couple 3.5" drives (ATA).

    Has anybody seen an enclosure (or rack mount system) that would let me mount all these drives as a "JBOD". I don't need to RAID them, but I'd like to get rid of all the power bricks, USB, USB2, and Firewire cables, and perhaps have just one Firewire 2 / ESATA, etc cable that I can hook into my network hanging off a PowerMac G5 Desktop.

    What I'm thinking I need to do is give them all to family/friends for backup media, and buy a homogeneous farm of disks in a rack type system to replace them (need about 3Tb of space to store backups of my Aperture Library and various Parallels and VMWare images for work).

    Any opinions or suggestions?

    TIA, Steve
     
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  2. Digitalclips, May 26, 2008

    Digitalclips macrumors 65816

    Joined:
    Mar 16, 2006
    Location:
    Sarasota, Florida
    #2
    I am in the exact same place as you. Just got a power Mac and now using SATA drives in that but I still have about eight bare external IDE drives I used with firewire external plug in adapters on my Dual G5. I am now looking for a box to stick them all in with a single FireWire 800 connection so they can all mount as individual drives (no RAID). I find plenty online but they are all are hot swap which adds cost and I do not need. A couple of cheap fixed 4 bay or one 8 bay would be fine for me. I found one company so far but they are in UK and I am in USA. Granite Digital is one company I am hoping have something.

    I have never seen a mixed type though, only seen IDE or SATA I doubt you can mix in one enclosure but you never know these days!
     
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  3. Goldenbear, May 26, 2008

    Goldenbear macrumors regular

    Joined:
    Jun 30, 2007
    Location:
    Los Angeles
    #3
    There's a bunch out there for JBOD, but I haven't seen any that support 2.5" drives. They tend to be fairly expensive. I think you end up paying almost $100/drive. They also typically have noisy fans and are big/bulky/ugly, if that matters to you.

    Here's one that's on sale. Most places are getting rid of the IDE-Firewire enclosures, since most drives are SATA these days.
     
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