External 5 bay SATA2 HDD Racks?

Nate_Cam · **9th July 2008, 12:05 PM**

I currently have 4 HDD in my case and my PSU is limiting an upgrade to a better graphics card. I am looking for an external case with power supply to house at least two sata2 drives. Keen for a few more bays i can expand into later.

Anyone have any ideas? I just need external storage with its own power supply. I remember a unit similar to this in the news section maybe a year or two ago on this forum. Havent been able to find anything suitable since.

Anyone recommend anything?

pistnbroke · **9th July 2008, 02:32 PM**

How about a " Drobo "....

eg: http://www.nexus.com.au/catalog/index.php?cPath=84

kiffies · **9th July 2008, 04:35 PM**

You want an NAS, do a search on ebay for them, they're not cheap but have lot's of benefits. Netgear and dlink both do nice ones

TiggerK · **9th July 2008, 06:28 PM**

Certainly gets expensive beyond two hard drives, Thecus also have some very nice models... Could be cheaper getting a basic PC with onboard RAID though!!

Cheers
TiggerK

scerrari · **10th July 2008, 09:54 PM**

Looking for the same thing myself. So will let you know what i can find. Do you know if you could asign seperate drives for individual things? Like one for recorded tv, and another for just music and so on?

Waldoverkill · **11th July 2008, 09:55 AM**

I used an 8 by external from PC-PITSTOP in the states. They also do 5 bay units but the freight is a bit harch. It came with two sata multilane connectors and cables to link to the main PC.

You could just use any case that will take the drives and use multilane to connect it to your MC.

The multilane basically combines 4x SATA into one cable through a PCI slot cover.

This would allow the drives to be directly connected to your MC as if they were in the case. Downside is that the new case needs to be very close (i.e. next to) your MC.

Cheers

Wal

kiffies · **17th July 2008, 06:15 PM**

Depending on how game you are you could build your own NAS box like I did

All you need is an old PC, doesn't have to high spec
A bunch of HDD's
Some sort of PCI sata controller (if your pc doesn't have enough sata ports)

Freenas- it's a linux based program

http://www.freenas.org/

Basically you install it to a thumb drive and it boots up. I didn't explain it very well but have a look on the website, all very self explanatory. I've got 6 x 500GB HDD's running in a raid 5