External 4 Bay Hard Drive enclosure needed

ace2109 · 5 Oct 2011 at 21:16

Hi Guys,
I need an external Hard drive enclosure that will allow me to install 4 separate drives. I have done a lot of goggling and can't find exactly what I am looking for.

I need one that will allow each drive to be used independently of each other i.e. when i plug it in I want 4 separate hard drives to appear.

Any ideas?

panyan · 5 Oct 2011 at 21:51

i think the chance of finding exactly what you want it VERY slim

personally i'd but four 3.5" caddies and tape them together

geuben · 5 Oct 2011 at 21:55

You need a caddy that supports "just a bunch of disks" mode or JBOD for short. There are 4 bay caddies that do this out there.

Werewolf · 5 Oct 2011 at 22:10

I keep looking for something like this that wouldn't cost a fortune, at the moment i'm half debating just getting a couple of USB to SATA adaptors, a hub and possibly making a case (I've actually got the drive caddies from a couple of old PC's for mounting the drives).

Either that or possibly finding an old Shuttle type case and modifying it and fitting the electronics inside it.

Brian8bit · 5 Oct 2011 at 22:13

Chyangfun do a few direct attached storage (DAS) units. USB2, eSATA, USB3. They've got 4 bay, 5 bay and 8 bay variants.

http://www.chyangfun.com/products_stroage.html

They're also rebranded and sold under a few other names. Though UK retailers stocking them are few and far between. Shame really.

david_129 · 6 Oct 2011 at 09:42

I was quite sure Drobo did this but they might have changed in their more recent versions

RimBlock · 6 Oct 2011 at 09:44

if you are not worried about bottlenecks then get a 4 drive external enclosure (some a miniITX cases work quite well or old CDRom towers being decom'd on ebay), mounting rails and an eSATA bridge (do a google and there are UK suppliers). Connect to your motherboards eSATA connection or get an eSATA card, which are pretty cheap for JBOD support only.

You could get two ESU2DSATA10 (2x SATA -> eSATA or USB2) bridge boards (around 38 quid each), a dual port eSATA card for your PC and a SATA2-PCIE02 dual port PCIe x1 card (29 quid) plus a CF-8051 5 bay external case (86 quid). Total around 191 quid + hard drives. Would be limited to a theoretical 250MB/s top speed by the PCIe 1.0a 1x card. You could upgrade to the Highpoint 622 which OCUK sell for 60 quid to double that at only an extra 30 quid.

Search for the part numbers and you should be able to find a UK stockist of the bits OCUK do not stock.

RB