Cheap, but reliable external FW800 HDD RAID

[sonicGLI]

I have 2 drobos for work, and really love 'em, but I need to buy like 3 separate external enclosures that can hold at least two drives per enclosure with RAID and FW800 support for the home and I don't want to spend DROBO money. Any suggestions? There are so many options out there that I'm a bit overwhelmed. I already have a bunch of 1TB drives, so I only need the enclosures.

[sonicGLI]

Hm, just had this sent from a friend, looks friggin' perfect for the price! But they're out of stock

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817729032

[edit] Found it at a couple other places, but I'm not sure I want small drives, think I'd like full-size since I have mostly full size drives laying around.

[SpiffyGTI]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816111038

^^ That's about what I'm seeing. Finding one with FW800 might be a little tough based on what I've seen doing a quick scan but I could be way off. Pretty much everything seems to be USB2.0 or eSATA and the more expensive models jump to USB3.0.

[sonicGLI]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816111038

^^ That's about what I'm seeing. Finding one with FW800 might be a little tough based on what I've seen doing a quick scan but I could be way off. Pretty much everything seems to be USB2.0 or eSATA and the more expensive models jump to USB3.0.

Ouch, this may be tougher than I thought

Pros: Inexpensive enclosure that works well for RAID 1 redundant storage.

eSATA interface allows for higher transfer speeds than USB 2.0

Cons: The actual SMART data of the drives is masked from the host, while the enclosure provides non-standard SMART data (unknown attributes) with "failing" values.

This causes Linux to flag the drive as "being used outside design parameters" even though there is no problem. The only way to stop this is to disable SMART monitoring of the RAID.

As a result, no software monitoring is possible, and you have to rely solely on the "Alert" LED on the enclosure to know if anything is wrong.

Worse yet, it isn't clear from the poor documentation if this LED indicates only RAID errors or if it will also alert for drive SMART errors.

Additionally, attempts to use this enclosure for RAID 0's performance boost fail. Instead of almost doubling throughput, it ends up a bit less than the performance of one drive alone.

Add to this fan that is loud even in its low speed. So you aren't likely to have this sitting on your desk, making it unlikely that you'll see the "Alert" LED if it does illu

Other Thoughts: Despite all of the shortcomings of this enclosure, this enclosure is one of the less expensive ways to set up redundant storage.

However, if you can afford the extra cost, I would recommend looking into a "smart" NAS enclosure instead.

[SpiffyGTI]

Are you looking to do RAID 1 or 0? I think they make it sound worse than it is. A couple cheap enclosures for cheap RAID 1 doesn't seem so bad.

[sonicGLI]

RAID 0

These won't need to be redundant and they are backed up on a central server.

[sonicGLI]

Well, I totally went another direction. I went with 3 2TB G-Drives. A lot of fellow photographers swear by them so I figured, what the hell? Problem solved, and I can just use the other drives I have to build out that big NAS backup box I've been wanting to build