I present to you the enterprise-class external disk enclosure, for the home user:



1) Nice, cheap, 4U enclosure with 9x 5.25 inch bays. Enlight EN-8990, available at or less than 100$ empty, and probably not the best solution (EATX-compatible case, internal cabling will possibly be longer than necessary). Any case with a multiple of 3 5.25" bays will be a nice, clean solution.



2) 5-in-3 hotswap cages, there are multiple options out there, with 5x discete channels on the backplane, or integrated 1-to-5 port multipliers. Also around or less than 100$ each.



3) 4x discrete to multilane bracket, for clean and secure attachment of enclosure to host. Combine with port multipliers and SATA-II for a small form factor 1.2GB/sec single cable attachment 15-drive enclosure, for very large multiple enclosure configurations, or use discrete channels and multiple multi-lane attachments (4) to provide headroom to achieve maximal performance (4.5GB/sec theoretical peak with SATA-II, actual will vary with disks) out of a single 15-drive enclosure.

I think there are a few 8x discrete, non-RAID SATA cards with PCI-X and PCI-E interfaces, I know Promise makes one. Isn't that just neat?

[Edited on August 19, 2006 at 1:11 PM. Reason : Oops, wrong bracket]

8/19/2006 1:06:13 PM

don't forget the costly ~$50 6-foot multilane cable

8/19/2006 3:24:31 PM

expensive cables are usually par for the course even with the smallest of external enclosures*

*that aren't a joke, such as USB 2.0 and FireWire

8/19/2006 5:15:02 PM

let's get a shot of those sexy cables



[Edited on August 19, 2006 at 5:28 PM. Reason : now that's a secure connection]

8/19/2006 5:23:31 PM

holy shit it gets even better

http://www.amamax.com/pomable1ta9x.html

with a 500W power supply, for 81 dollars

I'm totally ordering it right now

8/19/2006 11:32:55 PM

k, probably should have gone with the Enlight enclosure, this one is kind of flimsy

the plastic bling broke off already

9/18/2006 7:50:41 PM