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eSATA Drive Enclosures
I’m looking at some of these Granite Digital eSATA drive enclosures
(driveless models), can I get a recommendation or heads up if any
issues ?I’m thinking of Sonnet Tempo E4p or E2p eSATA card.
With things like 500 GB Seagate Barracudas going for not much over $
$ 100 I can’t see going the G-Raid or Lacie FW route as I have before
(I’d be working with ProResHQ with this stuff)I think it’s just as easier for me – at this point – to do frequent backups as it would be to go with a full RAID setup.
I would like to store backup drives off-site as well.
Alternate recommendations welcome, thanks !
-Sam Wells
FCS2, Shake 4.1, AE 7+
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11 Replies
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Look at the Sonnet enclosures too. They sell empty ones…400E I think. And look at MacGurus.com as well.
I buy populated ones, like the S2VR from Caldigit. Because if something goes wrong, then I have one person to call. Works if you get all from Sonnet too, or other companies.
But eSATA is a definate solution over firewire.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD now for sale!
http://www.LFHD.net
Read my blog! -
The least expensive 4-bay SATA enclosure I’ve ever seen is the one from Addonics. I think it’s like $200.
Sean
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I agree with Shane. I like to be able to call Tech Support if something goes wrong. The warranty is also usually longer when you buy a populated enclosure.
Ernesto Sanchez
ProMax, Inc.
E: ernesto.sanchez@promax.com -
Sam,
Micro Center purchased a bunch of the CompUSA stock to my surprise. when I stopped by last week… So I got 4 usb/esata 2 enclosure at 19 bucks each, yep 19 buckeros including cable and power and they have a little blue light ohhhh.. Silent with no fans…. Micro Center had the Western Digital sata drives with 16mb cache 500gigs for $105… So for $125 bucks I got a 500 gig sata drive. I use 2 at a time with my Macbook Pro as a mirrored raid for our HVX200 and so far very nice.. I am going back to buy more enclosures and then will buy Hard drives as needed for the jobs.. (cause they keep getting cheaper) The enclosures were easy to load with the drives. All you need is a phillips screw driver. I have purchased other enclosures from CompUSA (when they had a store) and they are still working. So they are pretty good off brand enclosures. Do your daily backups, build your own Hard drives / raids, save money..
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I’ve had good luck running FirmTek’s enclosures. I have two dual drive setups on my Mac and experienced exactly zero issues to date. One is running a pair of 750Gb drives. The other is running a pair of Hitachi 1Tb drives. They work and have some nice bundle pricing on their website. Worth checking out.
Tom -
[Tom Matthies] “I’ve had good luck running FirmTek’s enclosures. I have two dual drive setups on my Mac and experienced exactly zero issues to date. One is running a pair of 750Gb drives. The other is running a pair of Hitachi 1Tb drives. They work and have some nice bundle pricing on their website. Worth checking out.
Tom”Hi,
I really like my Firmtek card and enclosures. I got a better price at OWC on the card and enclosure bundle and no CA Sales Tax.
Best Wishes,
Mitch
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Thanks for the responses; I’ve decided to go with the FirmTek & ordered drives from MacGurus.
-Sam
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We use a bunch (~10 of each) of the 2 bay and 4 bay eSata enclosures from FirmTek, with the CalDigit 4 port eSata cards. I have about 400TB of Hitachi 1TB drives in the FirmTek sleds, and only have had one 4bay unit die. We bought everything thru Maxx Digital, and Ron took care of the return for us without hassle. I’d say we can highly recommend the combination of FirmTek, Hitachi & Maxx Digital.
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Tom,
this is the first time I’ve posted here, so I hope this gets to you or is following this forum’s protocols.
When you say you run two dual drive set-ups, are these in a RAID array? This concept is new to me. I”m trying to educate myself on RAIDs.
I run FCP on a Mac Book Pro as well, and have been storing my video files on external drives, not in a RAID array — but I’m thinking I should. I have just bought two new 500GB drives with eSATA and FireWire, etc, and I’m thinking I should set them up as a RAID array. Is this easy to do with a MacBook PRo, or do I need special software? and by running two dual drive set-ups, is this some way of backing up your RAID?
thanks.
Mathew Welsh
Producer, Director, Editor
Journeyman Film Company
http://www.journeymanfilm.com
Halifax, Canada -
On a MacBookPro you will need an sata card to run your drives as a pair. I’m not familiar with just what card will work in a laptop (since I don’t have a MBP myself) but you will need a sata card with two channels to run your drives in a RAID 0 configuration. Alternately, you could also use a firewire card and run the drives that way and still be able to stripe them together as a RAID 0 pair. It’s pretty easy to set them up once they are connected. Just go into the disk utility and select the option for RAID. Follow the instructions. With two disks, for speed, set them up as a RAID 0. For redundancy set them up as mirrored drives. The RAID 0 will give you faster bit rates while the mirror arrangement will give you safety at the expense of speed and you will also take a hit on the total capacity since the data is stored to each drive redundantly. Depending on just what kind of codecs you are working with, you may want to trade backup safety for speed. I haven’t tried to run striped drives on a laptop but it should work. Kind of cuts down the portability a bit, but it’s still not too bad. I run a pair of eSATA drives in an external enclosure as a striped pair for when I need the speed and also a pair of SATA drives internally as individual drives when I’m just loafing and editing DV materials. Even a single drive is getting me around 80Mb/second from a single drive. The trick with your MBP will be to get both of your drives connected at the same time.
Tom
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