Massively Multi Hard Drive

March 28, 2006 5:59 PM

External storage filter: external 2.5” enclosure for more than one 2.5” drive?

Laptop hard drives are getting bigger and bigger. I already have an external 20gb 2.5” drive that I use all the time and I love it. I want to know if anyone has enough google-fu or the existing knowledge of an external 2.5” enclosure that can hold more than one 2.5” drive. I would like to make something similar to this buffalo 1tb external drive, but much more portable and maybe with a little less storage. If such a product exists my priorities are: compact size, connection options (firewire, usb 2.0, serial ata, NAS), and if all possible I would like it to be bus powered.

So does anyone know of such a product? Or is there a way to hack together something like this with a little creativity?

posted by Infernarl to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

You're better off with a bigger enclosure which uses the space for air circulation to keep the drive cool. Otherwise the drives die young.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 6:08 PM on March 28, 2006

This sounds like quite a contradictory question. On the one hand you seem to want something small, but you're looking for something approaching 1TB? As far as I know 2.5" drives max out at 160GB. To get near a TB you're talking about six of them. Wouldn't it just be a whole lot simpler to use one or two 500GB 3.5" drives in external enclosures instead? And at that size I think you can forget about bus powering 6 2.5" drives. It seems that bus powering anything more than one drive is going to be really questionable.
posted by Rhomboid at 8:08 PM on March 28, 2006

Response by poster: I was thnking more along the lines of 2 to 4 200gb laptop drives (this size was just announced). can 3.5" drives be bus powered?
posted by Infernarl at 8:55 PM on March 28, 2006

I kind of doubt it. I think you might be able to find 3.5" enclosures with bus power but they will all have a disclaimer about "not intended to work that way" or something. With USB you can draw 500mA max, which is quite a bit short of what's needed to spin up a 3.5" drive. Maybe firewire is different though.
posted by Rhomboid at 9:26 PM on March 28, 2006

Some enclosures come with an extra USB connection to provide extra power.
posted by Sharcho at 1:19 AM on March 29, 2006

I have used several dozen multi-bay enclosures in various form factors over the years.

The main point of failure with these is the power supply, and/or the fan. That is likely to fail before any of the individual drives. They tend to use very cheap supples unlike, say, those intended for full systems. Or you can Of course, with an 8-bay enclosure from a good source the relative odds may be inverted. But you can pay a sngificant amount for high-end enclosures, so much so that simply adding another complete system with its own drives as NAS begins to seem economical.

Anyway, a single fan or power supply goes and multiple drives within that enclosure are unavailable until you can replace it. Something to consider...
posted by meehawl at 4:27 AM on March 29, 2006