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External enclosure for 3-4 drives

J

JWFerne

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 1, 2006
155
0
I'm taking 3 of my internal hard drives out and replacing them with larger.

If I wanted to take the 3 drives that I'm pulling out and put it into an external enclosure do you guys have any recommendations for nice looking and cost effective units?

My main concern is noise & heat that would come from an external unit with a few drives. I love how simplisic the WD books are, but since i have the drives I guess that would be a bad solution.

Thanks!
 
Can you format the drobo to have several mounted drives on your system? Like a Movie drive, time machine drive and bootcamp partition?
 
mooblie said:
THis will take five SATA drives, all operating at full speed down a single eSATA cable (SATA port multiplier).
Click to expand...

I understand port multiplication shares the 1.5 or 3 Gbps bandwidth of the single port.
 
cube said:
I understand port multiplication shares the 1.5 or 3 Gbps bandwidth of the single port.
Click to expand...
It does, and there's a speed penalty as well (latency due to switching between disks). A PM chip on 3.0Gb/s can only deliver 250MB/s max (halve it on 1.5Gb/s). Not bad though, given the cost savings that can be had by going this route. :)
 
Thanks guys, put an order in for that OWC enclosure. Fingers crossed it's as quiet as Uberamd said.

Cheers!
 
JWFerne said:
What do you guys think of this?

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEFW934AL2/

I like that it has firewire 400/800. Anyone have one? How loud is the fan?
Click to expand...

I have one. Noisy fan. The box is very well built. I got it on sale for cheap. I replaced the fan with a smaller one and got a long FW800 cable and put the unit under my desk. Now I can't hear it.

The only slilent drive is a no-fan enclosure and those only work for single drives. Why not just buy three FW800 single drive enclosures? Then you have enough drives to do a rotaing off-site backup.
 
cube said:
I understand port multiplication shares the 1.5 or 3 Gbps bandwidth of the single port.
Click to expand...

Agreed - I'm sure it does. But the eSATA port speed is (always) WAY higher than the speed the actual drive is capable of, mechanically - with current rotating drive technology, anyway.

In my case, I get around 75 MBytes/s R/W off a single SATA drive in that case.

75 MBytes/sec x 5 drives = 375 MBytes/sec = 3 Gbits/sec. The raw bandwidth in the port is there!
 
ChrisA said:
I have one. Noisy fan. The box is very well built. I got it on sale for cheap. I replaced the fan with a smaller one and got a long FW800 cable and put the unit under my desk. Now I can't hear it.

The only slilent drive is a no-fan enclosure and those only work for single drives. Why not just buy three FW800 single drive enclosures? Then you have enough drives to do a rotaing off-site backup.
Click to expand...

The fan is loud in yours? For an enclosure with a fan, mine is *dead* quiet in comparison to every other style I have owned with a fan.
 
mooblie said:
Agreed - I'm sure it does. But the eSATA port speed is (always) WAY higher than the speed the actual drive is capable of, mechanically - with current rotating drive technology, anyway.

In my case, I get around 75 MBytes/s R/W off a single SATA drive in that case.

75 MBytes/sec x 5 drives = 375 MBytes/sec = 3 Gbits/sec. The raw bandwidth in the port is there!
Click to expand...

It doesn't work that way.

PM technology will work fine so long as you're using individual drives. but if you try to RAID them you will run into limits compared with individual cabling.
 
pprior said:
It doesn't work that way.

PM technology will work fine so long as you're using individual drives. but if you try to RAID them you will run into limits compared with individual cabling.
Click to expand...
Yup. PM chips have a top end of 250MB/s (due to switching between drives) vs. 375MB/s for a single SATA port. So separate SATA or eSATA cables for each drive (1 drive per port) certainly allow for higher bandwidths in RAID use. :)
 
JWFerne said:
Can you format the drobo to have several mounted drives on your system? Like a Movie drive, time machine drive and bootcamp partition?
Click to expand...
Yes and no.
You can't put the bootcamp partition on ANY external drive. It must be internal (or eSATA). You also will only be able to access it under Mac OSX unless you format it as FAT32. You can format it as NTFS and have it work under Mac OSX if you install MacFuse (free).
All the drives in a Drobo are treated by the OS as one drive, but you can partition it to as many partitions as you please.

aibo said:
I'm also looking for a 4-drive enclosure but will probably wait for Drobo gen 3.
Click to expand...
Already out. It is an 8 bay device with an iSCSI interface.
 
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