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Setting up external SATA enclosure & WTB?

B

bigdz68

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 23, 2004
89
1
Bay YAYrea
Hi,

I have a dual 2.5 G5 (Late 2004) and I am looking to add at least a TB or so of extra HD space. I have seen Burly enclosures and plan on adding a 5 bay system (SATA). Now I currently have a video card in the AGP slot and want to know if it would be correct in buying an SATA card with 4 expansion slots. I plan on adding more of these enclosures in the future. I know they enclosures have port multipliers built in so 5 drives can use 1 SATA wire but will I have decent speeds with this "multiplier" setup or should I actually wire each drive to the back of my Mac via a SATA card. I don't use raid that often and just use these drives for redundancy or for massive files that need to be backed up/stored for a while.

Here is exactly what I plan on ordering:
http://www.burlystorage.com/ccp0-prodshow/MGBurly5PM.html

I see it says about 230 MB/s per enclosure and wasn't sure the speed difference as if each separate HD was wired in. I guess Im trying to see if it was worth it to wire each drive or if the port multiplier enclosure would work well.

Thanks
Dave

Also, any recommendations on SATA cards for this PCI-X G5?
 
Bandwidth for SATA-I is 150 MBs and for SATA-II its 300MBs. A single SATA-II port could probably support one set of 5 x 7200 rpm drives (actually it could probably handle 10).

You should investigate how fast your AGP slot is too, if you want to attach lots and lots of drives you might reach a limit there.

There comes a point where a real SAN is easier however. There are some very nice products out that use iSCSI over a LAN connection.
 
In order to use a port-multiplier enclosure, you need a compatible port-multiplier card. Not many of the cards on the market are port-multiplier. SOnnet and Firmtek have them, I don't know if they are shipping yet.

I really don't know what the AGP slot has to do with this discussion (?)
 
CanadaRAM said:
In order to use a port-multiplier enclosure, you need a compatible port-multiplier card. Not many of the cards on the market are port-multiplier. SOnnet and Firmtek have them, I don't know if they are shipping yet.

I really don't know what the AGP slot has to do with this discussion (?)
Click to expand...

Thanks everyone for the info.
In re to your post, do you recommend a specific card? It would have to be PCI-X. Just asking but will do some more research/hunting tonight after work! :D

Im sure the company I order from should also have a recommendation too.
In re to the cool drives, I want to have a separate enclosure with hot swappable drives in one stack instead of five-ten of those enclosures laying around. I already have something like that via USB/Firewire and all the extra cables are annoying and cluttering up workspace.

Thanks again all!
 
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