HDD enclosure for several disks?

[Chubbbs]

I'm looking for an external HDD enclosure for my HTPC. I'd like to put 4 or more SATA disks in a single enclosure, preferably connecting via eSATA. I looked on Newegg and only found one enclosure that holds 4 disks, and it's for IDE disks only. There's got to be larger enclosures on the market, short of a full-blown SAN solution. Right?

 

[DaveSimmons]

4 disks is a tiny market so you're definitely in SAN territory.

With 4 disks you should also be thinking RAID-5 since a drive will fail eventually.

How much storage do you need? for 500-750 GB a 2-drive enclosure would let you run RAID-1 mirroring. Or 1 - 1.5 TB if you don't care about data safety.

 

[Minerva]

Supermicro and Icy Dock have 5x3's. Five SATA drives that take up the space of 3 5.25" bays. About as tight as you can pack it. They have fans that are loud and it is advised to monitor the drive temps if you slow these fans down!

 

[Chubbbs]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
How much storage do you need? for 500-750 GB a 2-drive enclosure would let you run RAID-1 mirroring. Or 1 - 1.5 TB if you don't care about data safety.

4x 500GB disks running software RAID on Linux (MD driver via the EVMS storage management framework). I'll first try RAID-5, do some benchmarking, and if I don't like the performance, redo as RAID-10 (stripes over mirrors). So 1-1.5TB with at least single-disk redundancy (sometimes double with RAID-10, but not all combinations). This is for a MythTV box that will also be used for doing multi-track recording (with Ardour).

 

[Chubbbs]

Originally posted by: Minerva
Supermicro and Icy Dock have 5x3's. Five SATA drives that take up the space of 3 5.25" bays.

Is this internal or external? I was previously considering putting all the disks (6 including the system disks) in the case (probably a Silverstone GD01), but I'm worried about cooling them. I would like to keep at least the data disks outside the case in their own box, hopefully with a 120mm fan to keep them cool. I'm not optimistic that this actually exists.

 

[Minerva]

They're internal

Text

Although with the correct enclosure they will work outside of system.

Here is an external system but it's pricey.

 

[Chubbbs]

Bingo!! I found what I'm looking for, and it was on Newegg the whole time (under the server category). Norco DS-500e. 5 hot-swappable SATAIIs with an eSATA interface via an included PCI-e 1x card and cooled by a 92mm fan. Implements RAID 0/1/0+1/5 and JBOD in hardware or lets you handle disks directly through software. $440. I'm so happy now. I can get an mATX board and an Antec Fusion case and not have to worry about having enough SATAs on the board or fans to cool the disks. Plus it looks pretty slick:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816133005