External Raid Enclosure Review
External Raid Enclosure are widely-used to put externally hard drives nowdays. External hard drive enclosure can provide you more storage capability for your images,movies,musics and etc. And a Raid Enclosure can even made your date more safely.
There are so many things should be considered before you get one, what hard drives to use, the transfer speed, the security, the cost and more.
Nowdays most of people use SATA2 or SATA3 hard drivers but if you are still using the old IDE hard drivers, be sure your enclosure can support that. you should check your stat hard driver type to choose a 2.5 sata hard drive or 3.5 sata hard drive. Most of enclosures are using USB, eSATA or Firewire port for connectig, just check what you have in your motherboard can then pick the right one, if you have 2 or more of them,just choose the fastest one – USB 3.0>eSATA>Firewire 1394>USB2.0.
If you just need a more externally for your desktop or laptop, A usb hard drive can works well for you without any problems. But If you really need more storage or your date need to be more safely, you should consider the External Raid Enclosure. Maybe you can see somewhere about raid, like raid0, raid1, raid5 or raid 0+1, the different mode have various functions. If you need one big “hard driver” such like 4TB , you can get it by the setup of raid0 of using two 2TB hard drivers, and the transfer speed can also be double too. but there are only one problem, the raid0 is not safely enough, if one of your hard drivers get problems, you will lost all date. If you need mor saftly, raid1 or raid5 is better. basically, you can get 2TB storage if you use two 2TB hard drivers to build raid1 and the speed didn’t change, but even one of the two hard drivers had problems, you date are still there. using raid5 you more storage and speed than raid1 and more safely than raid0 but you need more than three hard drivers to build raid5. So the 2 bay raid enclosure can be used for raid0 and 1,and you need a 3 bay or more enclosure for raid5.
The other things to consider is the quality of enclosures, hardware, software, warranty and price. Here are some of them that we pickup for you to consider:
simple external hard drive enclosure suggestions:
Western Digital WD Elements 1 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive
Reason:Made by the biggest hard drive company WD; 1TB is enough for nomal using; USB 2.0 support; Less than $100
More bays but don’t need raid suggestions:
ProBox 4 Bay Hard Drive Enclosure for 3.5-inch hard disk drive
Reason:Really cheap for 4 Bays; USB 3.0/2.0/eSATA support;3.5″ SATA 2/3 hard disk drive up to 3TB support
Raid enclosure suggestions:
Western Digital My Book Studio II External Hard Drive(2 BAY)
Reason:Made by WD; Raid0 support;USB 2.0/FireWire 800/400/eSATA support
Data Robotics Drobo SATA Storage Array DR04DD10(4 BAY)
Reason:goo price for 4 bay; USB 2.0/FireWire 800 support; Hot expandable up to 16TB(raid)
Sans Digital SAS/SATA RAID 5 Tower Storage Enclosure(8 BAY)
Reason:8 bay enclosure; SAS/SATA support; Raid 0,1,5 support; External I/O:Mini-SAS (w/ PCIe 2.0 x8 6G RAID Controller)
PS: if you still can’t find anything you like,maybe the NAS(Network Attached Storage) is what you need, check more NAS products and details here.