I currently have 3 IDE DVD drives, each for a difference purpose. I also do not own a desktop PC but I do own a Macbook Pro 15.4". I’m looking for a way to enclose all 3 drives PLUS a new Blu-Ray drive that I will eventually purchase when they come down in price a bit. In short what I’m asking is if anyone here knows of a multi-bay 5.25" enclosure that can connect all of my drives via eSata, Firewire (400 or 800), or at the very least USB 2.0. I’ve been on Newegg and found these but I’m not sure if they’ll work in the setup I’m visualizing.
you do realize that to use the iStarUSA BPU 340SATA external enclosure you also be needing a PSU with at least 400W & SATA data cables and molex connectors trailing from your system to the enclosure
a far better option is this that actually supports booting of a HDD in the enclosure & comes with a PCI-X (not PCI Express, look here)
and my suggestion doesn’t require something like an external e SATA port multiplier
Holy poop…thank you for the response but that solution is $700!:eek:. I might as well get a couple IDE-USB 2.0 enclosures for each of the drives. That would be roughly $200 and change. I’m not being ungrateful of whinny but is there any cheaper option? I’m starting to think there might not even be a tower for DVD drives, only HDD. If no solution is possible I will possibly just buy separate enclosures for each drive even tho it’ll be a pain…:doh:
P.S.
Just to clarify things I am not trying to RAID any HDD, I’m not using HDD at all…I am looking for a solution to neatly stack 3 DVD drives and a Blu-ray drive so I won’t have a rats nest of cables all over the place. If it comes down to it I do have a 20GB SATA drive to use as some sort of boot able drive for them to be able to use on my computer.
:doh: should not skim read, sorry - my fault, the device i posted is typically for a server & is the “proper” way to do it, that enclosure is expensive, but, you appear to be like me with only 1 system at home
right, you’d probably be better building another system in a substantial case and simply throw a NIC (Network Interface Card) in each system & connect them together with an ethernet cable, you don’t need a top of the range system to build a data server, as the minimum requirement are dependent on the OS you decide to use, if you use Linux as the OS on your new data server the minimum requirements drop substantially lower