Building or Buying 4/6/8 Bay SATA Multilane eSATA or USB Case

[phpdog]

Hi ,

Can anyone recommend a reasonably priced SATA HDD Multilane Case , or components to build one myself ?

Im not entirely sure if " SATA to Multilane " is the correct name for these cases, so heres the type of thing i mean - Here 😕 .

I have about 12 SATA HDDs at the moment .

I was even thinking of buying 12 x SATA > USB/eSATA External Hard Drive Enclosures, and just plugging in whichever drives needed, instead of having them all running 24/7 . Has anyone done this themselfs ? If so what was the performance/Hardware like ?

 

[Antimatter85]

Sans Digital has several Port Multiplier units that use eSATA or USB2.

4-drive, 5-drive and 8-drive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...erver%20RAID%20Systems

 

[Emulex]

need a decent raid controller to push the multilane out, and quality cable no less.

the port expanders do work. can fan out x4 to x12 easily.

since sata is half duplex probably works out fine.

remember that a cabinet is a point of failure; maybe do two cabinets 5 each

 

[pjkenned]

I have tried a bunch of things like this.

Buying single drive eSATA enclosures is bad because you'd end up with 12 power supplies, 12 fans, 12 things to power cycle, 12 power chords to connect, and etc.
Going external, look at the SAS stuff (search for SFF cables and possibly raid cards with external connectors).
You can use much of it to hook up an external array. The big cons here are: expensive cables, cable length issues, accidental nudging, and power supply issues. The power issues are the less obvious things, but if you turn off your system, do you really want to have 12 SATA drives running which is probably 120w total once all is said and done? If not, how will you power down the drives? Manual switch? If so, then you need to remember to turn on the external enclosure before turning on your PC.

One thing to think about is using cheap SATA/SAS controllers with external ports. The Adaptec 3085 was super cheap, and handles 8 drives through two external connectors. With BBU you can probably find them for well under $200 these days. Beware, you will need to turn the external multilane cables into internal drive cables, and those converters tend to run $80 or so for 8 drives.

My suggestion: think about buying a cheap NORCO 4U with hotswap bays, and spend a few bucks putting together a server. It isn't cheap, but you can do a lot more (except have insane transfer rates) and solves a lot of the practical problems with BYO external storage. For a nice chassis + SAS expander + cables + converters + raid card you will probably spend more to have dumb external storage rather than a full server.