Harddrive advice

[samrulestothema]

Ok so i have been on a journey.
I have battled with data corruption, software compatibility and with my sanity.

But I have learnt a lesson from my journey. I no longer like RAID drives. At all.

My story starts with me buying a PRORAID box, to put my hard drives in. This is to tidy up my desk and to utilize the firewire port. It corrupted my data. and I am once again, spending my 6th day in data recovery. Suffice to say, this PRO RAID is going back on online auctions.

So if you got this far, im hoping you will stuck with me in some suggestions!! I have got 3 harddrives. Im looking for a 4bay enclosure. With a Firewire port. One that doesnt have raid. one i can simply put the drives in and my iMac will see and work with as if all that has changed is the connection.

Thanks so much if you guys can be bothered replying!! i just dont know what is suitable for me!!

 

[rtrt]

my first thought was that if you need a 4 drive enclosure, but only one interface to the mac, then any solution will likely support RAID. If you don't at least use the JBOD form of RAID then how will the mac 'see' all 4 discs? I have no idea if JBOD is any less likely to corrupt your data.

Then I thought that maybe you could look at drobo - but is that any more acceptable to you - as you'd need to trust the drobo not to corrupt the data either. I haven't used one so cant say how many problems there are.

Only other thing i can see is multiple fwire enlosures daisy chained.

but i wil say that i've not looked for an external enclosure for quite a while so there could be boxes out there that will do what you need

 

[Tyr.]

I don't think it exists because I've been looking for it myself. It's gotten to the point where I'm looking at building my own little SAN box with linux to share disks over the network. Oh and don't use JBOD either, one disk failure and you're hosed.

Edit: I may have found one. These Sonnet Fusion things access drives through an integrated port multiplier so disks should show up individually. There's anecdotal evidence ("Next, in Disk Utility I initialized the 5 drives, and set up a striped RAID O array"). Limited info on the site, maybe drop them a mail to see if it does what you need ?

Edit (again): here we go. Sure is fugly though.