multi bay external hard drive enclosures?

[jonKranked]

so I've got several hard drives sitting around that are still good, and would like to get a single external hard drive enclosure to house 4 drives. they're you're standard 3.5" ata drives, nothing weird. I checked new egg but all i could find was dual bay enclosures. any thoughts?

[eaterofdog]

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3268/2554310312_96fa609c8f_o.jpg

[jonKranked]

anyone have any relevant information?

[ridiculous]

they exist and they are pricey. Try looking for esata enclosures or HDD rack.

http://www.bixnet.com/4espomuraen.html

[ridiculous]

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=203452712

[Arkayne]

Check out Wiebetech products. I use them at work for our backup servers. I think they are moving to SATA products but poke around and you may find the ATA baydocks. They offer them with USB/FW as well as RAID flavors.

http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d11/pritos/MTB/rtx_trayfree.jpg

http://www.wiebetech.com/home2.php

[H8R]

Maybe:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822328001


?

[eaterofdog]

anyone have any relevant information?

It got your thread moving didn't it?

Are the drive really worth a pricey case? Why don't you just buy 4 cheap firewire cases and string them together?

[jonKranked]

It got your thread moving didn't it?

Are the drive really worth a pricey case? Why don't you just buy 4 cheap firewire cases and string them together?

i wasn't aware this sh*t was so pricey... single external enclosures run about $20 nowadays. Hell I could built a central server with parts I already have, and buy the rest that I don't for less than that.


Thanks for your help folks!

[oiswego]

for a cheap solution.....

just get external hard drive enclosures and a usb hub.
with the enclosures that you want to house multiple drives....you can run into some problems there because they typically need to have the drives configured as raid.

this is a problem because:
a) if drives are not same size, you have to configure the raid to use all drives as one giant partition with no redundancy. bad because if one drive fails, all your **** is gone.
b) for more than 2 drives, you'd want to have raid 1+0, but not all enclosures support this.

you can get an hp enclosure from best buy for about $100 (last time i checked anyways) that is network attached (bonus!), but i think it only does raid 0.

your best bet is this: get a cheap machine and install all the drives into that, attach to your network and then you have a nas device.

if you've got more questions, let me know

[SkaredShtles]

<snip>

you can get an hp enclosure from best buy for about $100 (last time i checked anyways) that is network attached (bonus!), but i think it only does raid 0.
RAID0? Sounds like a fairly useless enclosure. :D

[oiswego]

RAID0? Sounds like a fairly useless enclosure. :D

it is! more importantly, it was brain fart on my end: i meant raid 1.

[CraShRyDer7]

get a server case for them. also you can get a 5.25" bay reducers that u can probubly house the harddrives, but you will need 4 of those...

[Transcend]

I have a QNAP ts 209 pro II. 2 bay, NAS (gigabit ethernet), 3x usb, print server, media server, itunes server etc. Raid 1, Raid 0, JBOD, Singledisk. They make a 4 bay called the 409.