Hard drive enclosure

nevos2005 · 17 Dec 2013 at 12:57

Hi guys

Let me tell you my predicament. I have 4 hard drives with various stuff on each one, and i am looking for a 4 bay hard drive enclosure that will not require formatting before using it. i know most NAS enclosures require formatting before using them and sometimes the raid them together.

All i am looking for is an enclosure that can hold 4 drives and then can be attached via USB or esata to a computer.

Any ideas on how i can do this?

nevos2005 · 3 Jan 2014 at 12:30

Was away for holidays! any ideas anyone?

Greboth · 3 Jan 2014 at 13:21

Do you need to access all drives all the time or all at the same time?

If you don't, an easy and relatively cheap solution would be a hot swapable docking station for occasional access to files or if you only want to copy all to a new bigger drive.

If you do, why have you ruled out putting them in you PC? PCI SATA cards or 5.25" HDD enclosures might be the answer.

Assuming you are looking at an off the shelf NAS solution, have you considered building your own? It allows much more freedom so you may be able to run a small NAS OS drive and run your 4 existing as JBoD with formatting. I may be wrong as it has been a while since I looked into NAS boxes and even then I was focused on RAID but it might be possible.

nevos2005 · 7 Jan 2014 at 13:10

Greboth said:
Do you need to access all drives all the time or all at the same time?

If you don't, an easy and relatively cheap solution would be a hot swapable docking station for occasional access to files or if you only want to copy all to a new bigger drive.

If you do, why have you ruled out putting them in you PC? PCI SATA cards or 5.25" HDD enclosures might be the answer.

Assuming you are looking at an off the shelf NAS solution, have you considered building your own? It allows much more freedom so you may be able to run a small NAS OS drive and run your 4 existing as JBoD with formatting. I may be wrong as it has been a while since I looked into NAS boxes and even then I was focused on RAID but it might be possible.

I was thinking of making my own with the raspberry pi as the computer but then the hardrives would have to be connected via usb and that can be slow!

I would like all drives accessible all at once but no essential! All im worried about with nas is that the hardrives need to be formatted before use and then i would lose a lot of data!