MacGurus Burly Hotswap SATA Enclosures – Thoughts? Noise?

[David Roth weiss]

Sean,

Take a look at the seritek 4 bay units at http://www.firmtek.com. I have their two bay unit and it has a fan that is virtualy silent. Firmtek is a California company BTW, and your stuff will be shipped to you very inexpensively via UPS ground normally within just 24 hours.

DRW

[Sean]

There’s a good review of the Firmteks on Barefeats. My only concern is that they’re pretty unattractive and, for less money, the Burlies come with LCD temp monitors on each drive tray.

[David Smith]

[Sean] “My only concern is that they’re pretty unattractive”

That is so interesting…. I felt just the opposite comparing the two. The Firmtek is quite a bit smaller too and I like the direct connection they offer with no internal cables needed to bridge to the external connectors. As for temperature monitoring…. if the drives you choose offer the data, you can use Hardware Monitor to keep an eye on temperatures. I usually have it running and open so I can see what’s going on inside the computer too.

I’m curious, does anyone know whether turning on a drive’s temperature data output interferes with media data throughput?

David

[David Roth weiss]

[David Smith] “That is so interesting…. I felt just the opposite comparing the two.”

That’s also my take. Guess David’s all think alike???

[David Smith]

[David Roth Weiss] “That’s also my take. Guess David’s all think alike???”

Now there’s a scary thought, since there are so damn many of us!

[David Chai]

Why not check out http://www.cooldrives.com
They have tons of SATA enclosures of all different designs.

David 😀

—————–
David Chai
Director . Camera . Editor
http://www.davidchai.com
dc@davidchai.com
212 363 0159

[Sean]

Wow. You’re right. They do. This place is great.

[Jonathan Green]

After three months of heroically trying to get the Burly Hotswap box to work I returned it and am now working with a rock solid FirmTek 4 bay hotswap enclosure connected to a Firmtek SeriTek 4 port SATA card. I am running a standard dual 2.7 G5 with no other PCI cards. I first tried the Burly with a Sonnet 8 port card. This gave me constant system crashes, freezing, and the weird anomaly of multiple versions of the same SATA drive showing up at once. I then switched to the FirmTek card. This card much more gracefully reported disk disconnects without crashing the system but these disk disconnects continued on a regular basis making the system virtually unusable. My system log regularly reported hardware errors with both cards connected to the Burly. With the FirmTek card now connected to the FirmTek enclosure I have had no further problems.

I believe that the Burly box is incapable of handling clear connections to the drives and that momentary component failures or inadequacies or the loss of data integrity causes the crashes and freezing. These seem to be caused by inadequate Burly internal components. Also the Burly uses an internal cable to connect the external cables to the drives while the FirmTek with removable trays allows you to plug the drive directly into the backplane. See http://www.barefeats.com/hard46.html for more info on the delicacy of SATA connection technology. A quick review of many problems discussed on the MacGurus support forums will show that the problems I experienced are fairly common with the Burly box.

[Doug O’connor]

Its funny that you had such bad luck with the Burly boxes. I have 2 5 bays with 1 TB seagates, and a cal dig host card (on a Mac dual 2GH.
(cal dig card is great but discontinued for PCI-x). Very fast, not a single problem untill my raid 0 went down, I knew that was a bad idea. I will say that the one drive in the raid failed at the exact moment the overtemp alarm went off, and it was set to a low 104 degrees, so it wasnt the heat.

Any way, the burly boxes are very big, and the fans are very loud, so I bought 2 new firmtek 5 bays and a firmtek host, and some 1.5 seagates. So 7.5 TB’s of storage for about 1200.00. I will use this for my home system and BU (better late than never- lesson learned). The firmteks are small and very quiet, but I have been wresling with them for days. I am now considering buying 2 more Burly enclosures although I would really like to keep the Firmteks.

I will say that you should definately heed the good advice I have seen on this forum regarding raid 0. Eventually, the raid will go down, Just be sure to have a dupe set of media when you do. With that secuity you can run faster than raid 5, at significantly less cost, even including the price of extra drives.

[Hal Beery]

Greetings speed freaks! I’m looking for Voltage Specs on an old but hardy Burly two by eSata box I’ve had for many years (purchased from MacGurus in Spokane, WA). I have about 20 drives to attempt to find old camera footage… and I’m in a 220v environment… but I can’t remember if I can plug this directly into the 220v or if its a 110v only. I’ll have a transformer in a day or two.. but in the meantime, would be swell if anyone remembers the voltage on these indestructible, super reliable old beasts!!! THANKS IN ADAVANCE!!! Hal.