Where could i find a sort of "Super External Enclosure"?

May 24, 2007 2:47 PM

Is there such thing as an all-in-one external enclosure that would house Hard Drives AND Optical Drives, and have USB and Firewire Hubs?

I'm looking for some sort of "external tower" which would essentially be a fancy external hard drive enclosure. (instead of a giant messy stack of 4 different external enclosures, and 2 hubs with wires strung everywhere)

Something maybe aesthetically akin to the Fantom g-force Megadisk enclosure? ( http://www.micronet.com/General/prodList.asp?CatID=119&Cat=Product )

What i'm looking for is an external case that can hold 2 or more hard drives, (IDE, SATA whatever, which could RAID or not, i don't really care) but also (ideally two, but one would be okay) an external optical drive (5.25"), (DVD or CD or Bluray, whatever, again, either IDE or SATA) and also a firewire and USB hub.

The thing would plug in to the computer's firewire, and USB, and a power adapter to the wall.

Does anything like this exist? i just want a single enclosure for multiple drives (Hard drive and optical drives) with some USB and Firewire ports.

Newertech makes the "ministack v2" ( http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ministack/ ) which is essentially half of what i want (1 HD, USB and Firewire hubs, but no optical drives.) I'm just looking for the ministack's big brother.

does anything like this exist? anywhere? I want to use it with a Mac, if that's not obvious by my references, but i doubt it makes much of a difference. i would much prefer to use Firewire for the connection to the drives.

any help would be very appreciated!

posted by thirdoptical to computers & internet (6 comments total)

addonics has something like that. not cheap tho. nice selection of bridge boards, can have various (but not all combinations are possible, I think) ata or sata on the inside, then esata, usb and/or firewire on the outside.

you could just find a nice solid 5.25" 4 bay scsi external case, and then buy whichever bridge board you need. bit of custom work putting the board in, drilling out the holes for external ports etc.
posted by dorian at 3:13 PM on May 24, 2007

A little searching turned up this four drive bay firewire enclosure. It supports four IDE devices (hard drives, CD-ROMs, CD-RWs, etc.) and has two firewire ports that can be used to connect to other devices. However, it doesn't include any USB support and doesn't support SATA without connecting a SATA->IDE bridge to the SATA devices.
posted by RichardP at 3:22 PM on May 24, 2007

This seems to be a start. 4 5.25" bays, which you could use for optical drives and hard drives on those metal adapter things. Adding USB and Firewire hubs should be fairly straightforward if you don't mind a little DIY work.
posted by jjb at 5:55 PM on May 24, 2007

Outside of rolling your own enclosure, a FireWire enclosure like RichardP linked above is likely your best bet. We got a similar 4-bay model at work, which happily works with a mix of hard and optical drives.

One caveat: the model we got does not like (certain?) (all?) Lite-On optical drives. I tried to outfit this enclosure with four recently-purchased Lite-On DVD drives and discovered that the firewire bridge used in our model (Oxford 911+) seems to work with anything in our shop, with the exception of the LiteOn drives. YMMV.
posted by porn in the woods at 5:58 PM on May 24, 2007

I've used a great range (like, several dozen) of enclosures since 2000, running 24/7 in a variety of machines. At first blush, consolidation looks great. However, most enclosures kimp on fans and power supplies, and inevitably suffer a very high rate of failure when compared to other components. The irnoy of all your sweet, consolidated hardware being taken out of commission by a 20-cent fan is humbling, and quite annoying. Either ensure you get fanless enclosures with high-quality, easily replacable PSUs, or get multiple, redundant enclosures for each drive, or have a consolidated spare or two on hand.
posted by meehawl at 6:38 AM on May 25, 2007

You could get a MicroATX case (or maybe even a nano-ITX case) with no motherboard, just drives, power supply, fans, and then fill all the spare room inside with a pile of external adapters.

I take it this is for a laptop?
posted by Zed_Lopez at 3:38 PM on May 25, 2007