Making a multi bay external enclosure?

Chris1712

Chris1712

Chris1712

Soldato
Joined
29 Jul 2004
Posts
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Bristol
OK, currently i have a dual bay sata-usb enclosure, with 2x500gb hdd's in. I filled these up long ago and am constantly deleting bits and pieces to fit new content on.

What i really want is something i can whack 4 or more sata hdd's in, with one usb/fw800/esata connection coming out the end. Is there any cost effective way to do this? I have found a few 4bay sata-usb2 enclosures but they're about £90 which is a bit more than i really want to spend, with 2 bays less than half that.

Any bright ideas people? It will only really need to be JBOD as its just for storing dvd images for my media centre, i need the storage space more than anything at the moment. Is it possible to make something myself?

I want it external as i only have a laptop (MBP).

One brief brainfart i had was getting an internal enclosure like the ICYbox ones, and using esata with an expresscard on my mbp, but think that might be overkill, figuring out a psu and so on aswell.

I have looked into NAS, but they seem a bit to slow in most cases, and more expensive. I also thought about building an old machine into a file server, but then power usage is gonna be a pain.


Dont know what to do!
 
Doh to late people I've ordered two of these...

Icy Box 3.5" x 2 Black JBOD SATA Enclosure
siicyib321bph5.jpg


and a Samsung F1 1tb. Now i have a nice shiny case for my current 500's, and room for another tb once i fill up the new one.
 
Thread revival, but was wondering how you're getting on with the new Icy Box :)

I'm looking to order 2x Samsung 1Tb drives and an enclosure in the near future, to accompany a MacBook which I'll also be ordering :cool:
 
Blimey.

Its going fine yeah, the unit itself is of nice quality and it looks pretty swish. The design is a bit iffy, the 'cage' attaches via two screws on the underneath, so if you've only got one drive in there you need to hold it very precariously to get the screw in (no weight holding down the cage in side). Also the hdd/power light cable is pretty chunky, and can be awkward to route between two drives.
One annoyance with mine was the different finishes. One has a polished silver surround hting, one is still black. Bit of a bummer but helps me remember which enclosures which!

Performance is as normal, 30mb/s when i have only one enclosure on, down to about 19mb/s when i have them both turned on (my 2.99 usb hub probably doesnt help).

The fans are virtually useless because of there size, and the PCB for the controller etc. actually sits between the intake and the drives, so no air gets to the drives anyway! Not plugged in mine.

Look nice though :p.

03062008139bq9.jpg


Excuse the dust and cable jungle!!
 
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Also thanks, Chris1712 :) They do look smart, will definitely be tempted by one or two in the near future. Although will keep my eyes pealed to alternative solutions.
 
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