Hard Drive Encasements

Puddin · Posted: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 02:30:25 Post Subject: Hard Drive Encasements

Is there a case out there that holds multiple hard drives for storage purposes only?

MEaning i can hook up SATA HDs externally and plug them in and have them reconized as one big HD? OR even multiple Externals?

the the cheapest external i foun were denct prices but i liek the internal drives incase i ever wanna put them in a computer.

Any help is greatly apperciated.

Enigmachine · Rated NC-17 Joined: 17 Mar 2006 Posts: 122

There are several NAS cases you can buy that will let you add your own HD's, from 1 to 3 in general.

They're usually connected by ethernet instead of USB though, because they're like mini-computers, so they're a bit more expensive, but still reasonable and pretty useful imho.

For example Netgear and D-Link have NAS boxes that are from 100 to 300$, support 2 internal hard drives, JBOD and RAID 1 and ethernet connection... I think the D-Link has USB too...

Anyway I'm pretty sure you can find reviews by googling for Netgear SAN or NAS for instance. It seems to be a fairly popular product.

mrweasel · Posted: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 11:24:39 Post Subject:

here's one I've been looking at:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822165029

I know it already has drives in it, but it's still not a bad price

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 11:31:31 Post Subject:

We saw these at CES 2006 and thought they rocked. Still like them, but so much $$$...

newegg.com

Kilamon · Rated XXX Joined: 22 Mar 2005 Posts: 811

You might also look at link and be sure to google the mods you can make to it. Seems that Linksys made a fantastic product with lots of capability, but since the average user is stupid, they had to dumb down the shipping version. With a little work, you can make it do a lot more than advertised.

Hellfire · Rated XXX Joined: 05 Aug 2003 Posts: 3473

I know Ultra has some stackable enclosures coming out.

I would think you could get any enclosure, and use a software raid utility like nvraid to raid them together via USB. I've never tried it though so can't say, or speak to the performance compared to a dedicated raid channel/device.

Would be great if you could do it via SATA/eSATA, so much faster than USB....

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 13:02:55 Post Subject:

Well, from my USB RAID experiment article, USB RAID and Windows doesn't work well at all... Laughing

Unless Vista changes things, I would get a dedicated solution.

edvallie · Posted: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 13:08:58 Post Subject:

mrweasel · Posted: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 13:16:16 Post Subject:

he spelt it right