Enclosures

[stangdaman]

I am considering running Amahi on an older PC I have in my house that has not been getting a lot of use lately. I'd like to add storage too it but it really doesn't have a lot of internal space for that so I'm going to have to add an external enclosure in order to get the kind of storage capacity I would like. I have about five drives I would like add so I want something that can handle at least all five. I've been looking at these,

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... llFullInfo

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816111166

but I seem to see some pretty negative reviews. I know that customer feedback can often just attract those that are disgruntled but I don't really see anywhere to find good reviews of these types of enclosures so I thought I'd see if I could get any input from people here as to what might be good picks. With either of the two above I'm not really planning on using the RAID functionality just JBOD and have Amahi control the rest. I don't know if that effects things.

Also, I'm considering adding an esata card to get a little better read write speed out of the enclosure but this system only has PCI slots. Would a PCI ESATA card be worth it or would it be better to just keep using the USB ports? Any input is appreciated.

[radioz]

As near as I can tell, an eSata PCI card might be faster.

Do you have spare SATA connectors on your motherboard? You could use cables to reach those externally.

[ghstryder]

I am considering running Amahi on an older PC I have in my house that has not been getting a lot of use lately. I'd like to add storage too it but it really doesn't have a lot of internal space for that so I'm going to have to add an external enclosure in order to get the kind of storage capacity I would like. I have about five drives I would like add so I want something that can handle at least all five. I've been looking at these,

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... llFullInfo

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816111166

but I seem to see some pretty negative reviews. I know that customer feedback can often just attract those that are disgruntled but I don't really see anywhere to find good reviews of these types of enclosures so I thought I'd see if I could get any input from people here as to what might be good picks. With either of the two above I'm not really planning on using the RAID functionality just JBOD and have Amahi control the rest. I don't know if that effects things.

Also, I'm considering adding an esata card to get a little better read write speed out of the enclosure but this system only has PCI slots. Would a PCI ESATA card be worth it or would it be better to just keep using the USB ports? Any input is appreciated.

If you take a look here: http://forums.amahi.org/viewtopic.php?p=16451#p16451 you will see a recent post by a user who bought a 4 bay Rosewill box and card. You might compare yours to his, especially the card, and he might entertain questions.

Be careful with JBOD - the manufacturers toss that term around like it means something. It could mean a collection of single disks, but it can just as easily be taken as the total of it's contents (which is what my Highpoint card does). The box essentially becomes one big partition. That works, of course, if you use GPT, but does not work quite so well for Greyhole.

[stangdaman]

Nice to know. Thanks. I won't be using the card that comes with that Rosewill one I linked to. It's PCI-Express and the box I will be using only has PCI so I'll have to get a different card. I mostly just want an enclosure I can put a bunch of drives in.

[stangdaman]

As near as I can tell, an eSata PCI card might be faster.

Do you have spare SATA connectors on your motherboard? You could use cables to reach those externally.

I don't think the box has any internal SATA connectors actually. I could be wrong it's been a while since I've had it open but I think it's only got IDE. So my options would really only be to add a PCI esata card or use the USB 2.0 ports (of which it has plenty). Well I could add internal SATA connectors via the PCI slot too but since there isn't really a lot of internal room for drives anyway that won't really help.

[stangdaman]

It almost looks like it would be cheaper to just buy a used HP Mediasmart server than buying an enclosure that can fit that many drives. Have people had a decent experience converting these to Amahi?