Please Recommend me a CHEAP 4 drive esata enclosure without drives…

[Jeremy Garchow]

Yeah, that’s what I took from it too.

Reliable long term storage is still a very underserved market unless you go with LTO or DLT both of which are slow and can be hard to access and can have high up front costs and low storage capcity per unit (tape).

Jeremy

[Sean Oneil]

[Jeremy Garchow] “What can slow down the speed is that some drives have a jumper on them that allows them to operate @ 1.5 gpbs. If you take the jumper off, it can operate at 3 gbps.”

It’s not really a big deal since no single hard drive is faster than 1.0gbps anyways. The 3gbps standard of SATA II is really for future potential. The only good it does now is if you use a port multiplier where multiple disks share a single port.

Sean

[Bryan Roberts]

So with PM you get faster rates out of non raided SATA drives?

Yesterday I bit the bullet and ordered the USB Ware 5 bay External SATA enclosure with PM. It’s scheduled to arrive today (their warehouse happens to be 40 miles away from me). Thanks guys!

[Sean Oneil]

[Bryan Roberts] “So with PM you get faster rates out of non raided SATA drives”

No, it has to be RAIDed still. What I was saying is that it’s a matter of bandwidth. The SATA speed is just bandwidth. But an actual hard disk can only operate at 50-100MB/s at the most. So the 150MB/s for SATA-1 still provides plenty of overhead, thus 300MB/s SATA-II (and SAS for that matter) is totally unnecessary.

But, if you use a port multiplier, then you have five disks sharing the same 150MB/s pipe. So if you RAID them together, it will exceed the 150MB/s threshold, thus you’d want SATA-II for this type of situation.

Long explanation short, SATA-II over SATA-I does nothing for you unless you have PM.

Sean