[Jason Myres]

We’ve tried a few enclosures at work in the hope of building some affordable storage for large system images we use everyday. The two we’ve tried so far are:

https://www.istarusa.com/storage/mini_trayless/v7age420es.aspx

and

https://www.axus.com.tw/product_fit_01.asp

We used Hitachi 1TB Ultrastars in each and got about 120MB/s read/write out of each using a SIIG PCIe SATA Card. We have not tested them to their limits, but for cheap storage they might be an option. However, when you compare them to a fully engineered solution like a Maxx Digital or CalDigit, you do see where that extra money went. For AFP sharing, with good drives, they might be just right.

For a popular article on an 8-drive home-built SATA array tested for HD video editing, take a look at:

https://www.squeezeanickel.com/SATAII/

JM