External caddy for 4 drives from Mac Pro Tower

[btompsett]

Hi

I have just upgraded from an early 2008 Mac Pro with 4 x 500GB 3.5inch 7200rpm drives to a late 2015 27inch 5k iMac. What is my best option in terms of an external caddy for utilising the 4 drives from my old Mac Pro. I do music and each drive is used to house things like projects/audio and various different sample libraries. Presumably a thunderbolt caddy would be best? Are there any particular specs I should look for? Thanks very much. Ben

 

[Gav2k]

Check what model drives you have. You won't need the throughput of tunderbolt, USB 2/3 will be fine for older platter drives.

 

[btompsett]

I can't check my drives right now but am fairly certain they are 500GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s; 7200 rpm; 16MB cache, all 4 of them are the same except perhaps the system drive that might be 320gb capacity. My music projects will be pulling data from each drive simultaneously, for example it might be running a piano sample library from one drive, a drum library from another, orchestral stuff from another etc. Will USB 3 still be sufficient in these circumstances? Any recommendations?

 

[ActionableMango]

A USB 3 enclosure would be adequate for platter drives. I would avoid USB 2 for being too slow and avoid Thunderbolt for costing too much.

I would make sure you get a USB enclosure that supports UASP, but sorry I don't have a specific one in mind as I've never needed a 4-drive enclosure.

 

[scott.n]

At this point in those drives' lives, you might consider upgrading/consolidating to a dual drive RAID setup. Something like the WD My Book Duo. The USB 3 version should be fine.

There are 4-bay JBOD enclosures out there, but reviews make them sound pretty flaky.

 

[hfg]

I use a OWC Thunderbay 4 on my 5K iMac which contains a couple of hard disks and a couple of SSD drives. It is working great for me. Somewhat cheaper is a USB 3.0 OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 4-drive enclosure which should be fine for your hard disks.

 

[h9826790]

I am using this one, ~$130, 5 bay USB 3.0 connection.

http://www.orico.cc/goods.php?id=4827

 

[pastrychef]

I like NASes. I put together a 4 drive NAS for about $75 (not including the cost of drives) and about 15 minutes of work. I get ~110MB/s reads and writes from it.

 

[Squuiid]

+1 NAS is the way to go.
Synology.