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

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

thirdoptical — Thu, 24 May 2007 14:47:11 -0800

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!

By: dorian

dorian — Thu, 24 May 2007 15:13:30 -0800

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.

By: RichardP

RichardP — Thu, 24 May 2007 15:22:03 -0800

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.

By: jjb

jjb — Thu, 24 May 2007 17:55:51 -0800

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.

By: porn in the woods

porn in the woods — Thu, 24 May 2007 17:58:50 -0800

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.

By: meehawl

meehawl — Fri, 25 May 2007 06:38:58 -0800

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.

By: Zed_Lopez

Zed_Lopez — Fri, 25 May 2007 15:38:22 -0800

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?