4-bay Firewire/USB2 RAID enclosure for OS X?

March 29, 2009 11:23 AM

Looking for recommendations on a 4-bay Firewire/USB2 RAID enclosure that works well with OS X. I'd also like to see recs for a eSATA equivalent, though I'm definitely leaning towards Firewire/USB2. Thanks!
posted by xmutex to Technology (9 answers total)

Response by poster: Meant to add: one that supports SATA drives.
posted by xmutex at 11:25 AM on March 29, 2009

If you're willing to consider a networked drive instead, the DNS-343 is a 4-bay enclosure that'll work with anything that can talk to a samba server, which means everything. I've had a good experience with its 2-bay little sibling, the DNS-323. If you have a spare network port on your router, I can't see much downside to this approach (unless it's a priority to detach it and carry it around to different machines.)
posted by Zed at 11:33 AM on March 29, 2009

Drobo? I haven't used one but their name comes up a lot here.
posted by chairface at 12:02 PM on March 29, 2009

I'd look into what Wiebetech has on offer. A bit more expensive than a no-name box from Fry's or something, but every Wiebetech enclosure I've had has been bulletproof.
posted by kid_dynamite at 12:50 PM on March 29, 2009

I have a Drobo. Total elapsed time from opening the box to having 1.5 TB of storage on my Mac (over USB, using SATA drives) was about 4 minutes. It's not, strictly speaking, RAID (which is one of the more controversial things about it), but it allows hot swapping, mirrors the data, etc. etc., and it doesn't care if I mix and match drive sizes/brands/etc. Very, very happy Drobo customer, even if the whole "data robot" and "zomg we have Cali Lewis doing our walkthrough" things are silly.
posted by socratic at 1:41 PM on March 29, 2009

I also LOVE the Drobo.
posted by Studiogeek at 5:40 PM on March 29, 2009

Nthing the Drobo here. Running on my iMac like a champ, awesome functionality, you just can't beat hot-swapping multiple sized drives. So far, it just works.
posted by griffey at 8:04 PM on March 29, 2009

I really love the LaCie 4big Quadra which has Firewire 400 & 800, USB2, and eSATA.
posted by Xuff at 5:08 PM on March 30, 2009

Drobo is probably the best you can get for the price. Anything better would probably be a big, expensive, "real" RAID box or a server. Most of the cheap SATA RAID USB/FW bridge chipsets used in the low cost fake RAID boxes are just not worth the headache. This is the data you're going to the effort to store on a RAID after all, so you may as well do it right.
posted by bigtex at 3:54 AM on April 1, 2009