8 drive eSATA external enclosure with RAID card and cables $260

[Modelworks]

Good deal for someone wanting a lot of external storage. Two 4 bay drive enclosures each with their own power supply and cables + pci express controller card for the pc.

http://www.weirdstuff.com/cgi-bin/item/20204

Are you ready for some serious storage? How would you like to connect up to eight SATA drives to form up one giant drive? Or are you interested in data security? This massive kit includes two Addonics mini storage tower external SATA enclosures each with their own independent power supply, a HighPoint PCI-express eSATA RAID controller, and two quad-channel eSATA cables! Just add you own drives and go! This kit gives you the highest performance external storage option, better than FireWire 800 even!
Includes:
Two Addonics Mini Storage Tower Enclosures (MST4ML-B)
Two InfiniBand Cables (varying length)
One HighPoint RocketRaid 2322LF PCI-Express HBA

The card alone is over $200 at newegg and the cables sell for $50-60 each. It does say it is pulls so they were removed from working systems, but if you need the extra storage space looks like a good deal.

 

[Plester]

I ran one of these enclosures (4 drive raid5) with this same HighPoint RocketRaid card as a media array in an Avid Media Composer video edit system and it was very fast - 250+mb/s sustained transfers, allowed for uncompressed HD work. Certainly kind of a niche piece of kit and you can't grab one and go plug it in to any old machine like esata but $260 for $550-600 worth of gear...

 

[VinylxScratches]

I'm very tempted...

 

[nhocstrasser]

Is there anything like an external quad channel to single channel eSata adapter that uses port multipliers? I'd love to hook this up to an machine that I already have which has no pcie slots free.

Thanks.

 

[Mday]

Nice deal, for those who don't already have controllers. I have a 12port sata raid6 controller, and this would not work for me without an infinityband multilane adapter.