1TB (500X2) is to price so, could you help me look for alternatives?! (USB encolusres hunt!)

Hey guys I'm having a bit of problems with my bites... i cant get enough. My old computer has 4.3 TB fully loaded ( i added 2 more drives this week!) But well the whole lets spin all the drives at the same time and let them get hot as hell to turn your room into a sauna form hell, thing is a little bit annoying.

So I'm looking for a solution i have a total of 12 Drives that id like to keep, the rest ill sell off for a quick buck (i'm sure some one out there will pay 30 bucks for 250gb that are still under warranty) (woot 5 year warranties). I bought one of those Slot loaded units (you know the ones that work like a nintendo! where you put the HD in vertically) sounds supper cool but the 3 i had simply sucked to infinity. ATM im using one of those ide/sta 2 usb! but the drives are not protected and well it doesn't look nice.

What would you guys recommend? buying 12 cases is out of the question, for that price i can actually buy 3-4TB (cases go around 35-40). I have 2 desktops fully functional maybe i can turn them into a server type thing? id like the drives to remain "off" till i wake one up i wouldn't mind having to wait for it to turn on i just cant handle the heat the 12 of them dish out, on top of the 7800gt.

Well i really dont know what to do I hope some one is able to translate my Engrish to english and give me an answer.


PD: our laptop (7811) has eSata but i cant find a cable that has eSata in one side and sata+power sata in the other. I thought eSata was able to carry the power to the hadrive, if not whats the point of having a sata outside if they don't give me a power cable to go with it? doesn't make scene to me, usb does both data and power.)

Thank you for taking the time to read the whole thing guy!(or guys if im lucky hahaha )!

 

I'm not even going to attempt to decipher what you are trying to do above but the point of eSata is speed. Plugging into the esata (external sata) port is just like plugging directly into the disk controller. You no longer are limited by the connection method like you are with USB but instead can use the disk to it's full potential. USB you are lucky to pull 30 MB/s no matter how fast the drive you are using. eSata is limited only by your disk. It's really no different then how your internal SATA drives work, it just allows you to run one from a nice external port.

 

yea there's a huge difference there's no juice/power/powa out side, but i get your point more bandwidth. Now maybe some one will read my post and post a feasible solution to my storage problems.

 

If your looking for 4.3 TBs of external storage that is powered by the machine im afraid at this time there is no solution . The largest selfpowered ie USB that i have seen is 500gigs . Esata does not provide power to the drive as it would require way to much so it cant .

 

You could pick up an enclosure and throw a 1.5TB drive in there very easily but for that much capacity you are looking at either a dedicated fileserver or some type of SAN/NAS setup.

 

Well thank you for your answers, im back to square one then. at least now i know esata doesn't provide power, so i gained something from it.

Ok does any one know a way to make windows not turn on the hadrives till is told to do it? I could do it manually btu i think it will shock me i remember my IDE hadrive going on fire or blowing up the a board when i tried it back in the day. But this ones will be Sata

 

The only way I think you could get close to what you need (4.3TB) is to use the eSATA port on the laptop, then get an ExpressCard eSATA card. That'll give you three eSATA ports. There *are* eSATA "hubs" (Link to a seller) that turn one eSATA port into 3-5, but I have no experience with them, and they tend to be rather pricey. But that's an alternative to the ExpressCard solution.

Then just get three 1.5TB drives and three separate enclosures, or get one of those steel 3-4 drive external enclosures. You don't want to deal with terabytes over USB 2.0. Trust me.

EDIT: eSATA hubs need a port multiplier controller to work. I don't know whether there's an ExpressCard port multiplier adapter. Here's one: Link

The easiest way for you to provide power would be to get a multi-drive eSATA controller like this one only not as expensive.

 

I think the lack of a standard power interface for eSATA is going to make that impractical for a hub solution. However, I doubt the market would see it anyway. I don't see why multi-port USB hubs could not have easily implemented a software toggle on individual ports. I have several self powered devices that I'd rather not have to manually plug and would much rather toggle the power to via a software control panel. Unfortunately I haven't found any hubs with that capability, which means I'm just wasting power with those devices if I leave them plugged in.