I'm looking to buy an external raid enclosure, basically I need it to be quiet, preferably SILENT, and not too expensive. Firewire/USB connections would be best, eSATA also good but not necessary. Preferably at least three slots, although two could work if the price was right. Anybody know of any good models?

12/9/2006 12:53:24 AM

if you use firewire/usb and host-side RAID logic expect array rebuild times of weeks and fairly poor performance rebuilding or not.

if you use firewire/usb to connect an active enclosure, expect something that is not "cheap" and still performs pretty poorly, but will at least have the internal data rate necessary to rebuild the array within a reasonable period of time.

what you probably want is eSATA or multilane SATA over Infiniband, but even then you're taking unnecessary risks with your data, unless you have a southbridge-integrated controller that has its own dedicated internal bus, a PCI-X/2-4x PCI-E controller, or a hardware controller that can sustain high throughput.

to clarify, it's important to have a high data rate from the drives to the parity / mirroring logic in a SATA array, because SATA drives are extremely large and occassionally flaky. rebuilding a terabyte or a few at 20MB/sec is a recipe for multiple drive failure and consequent total data loss.

12/9/2006 8:55:57 AM

Hmm, thanks for the info.

Clarification; doesn't necessarily have to be RAID'd; just needs to house multiple drives. I'm going for storage more than speed (as I know that USB/firewire really isn't that fast).

12/9/2006 2:09:01 PM

I have this one -- Firewire 800 and it is quite good. Pop in your own drives.


http://www.fwdepot.com/ has a pretty good selection of different drives, various connections and drive capacities.

[Edited on December 9, 2006 at 2:53 PM. Reason : link]

12/9/2006 2:53:22 PM

How loud is that enclosure (the 40mm fan)?

12/9/2006 4:45:52 PM

You know that it is there, but it isn't overly obnoxious....
I wouldn't use it if you have a super quiet system, but in an enclosure that small, you have to have some cooling.

12/9/2006 7:39:44 PM