If I’m going to be a charter member of the Terabyte Lifestyle club, I should probably get organized about it. Which is why I’ve been looking around at external hard drive enclosures lately. I’ve used IDE drives in external USB 2.0 drives for years with generally excellent results, but I know I can kick performance and reliability up dramatically by switching from USB to direct SATA connections. The new PC (which is scheduled to arrive Saturday) has four internal SATA adapters, of which two will be connected to internal SATA drives. I can use an adapter like this one or this one to make the internal adapters accessible to individual external devices. But I’d rather have a single box that holds four or five SATA drives in a RAID array that can then plug into a SATA RAID controller.
The StorCase InfoStation is one option. It uses removable drive trays that can be hot-swapped. It even supports SATA II drives. But at $1000+ not including drives, it doesn’t fit my budget.
The TeraByte HotDrive 1TB, at $999 including drives, makes more sense. I’m leery that I can’t find a data sheet, though. Has anyone tried this device? Anyone from Evergreen Technologies want to contact me offline?
Any other suggestions for products designed for storage fanatics?
Update: The PC Doctor suggests LaCie’s Biggest F800 1TB. It didn’t make the short list because 1) it uses IDE drives, not SATA; 2) Thomas Hawk has scared me off the LaCie drives with his experience (although I still think he’s got a separate hardware issue); and 3) at $1499, it’s too expensive!
Buffalo makes a really nice Terrabyte server. They sell it at Fry’s. It’s very quite and powerfull.
I need to configure windows Raid-5 with 1 TB usage space external Storage ,for that how many HDD i have to add it?
Aravind, to get 1TB of RAID-5 storage you would need three 500GB disks or five 250GB disks.