Yea, looking for an SATA enclosure as well. Missed out on the Antec a few weeks ago.

This one looks pretty decent - the look, and the features. My concern is the workmanship and the build quality.

I have a crappy IDE enclosure - the IDE cable connection falls apart.

also puzzled by that 750GB limit. It is 48-bit LBA compabile. What is holding it then?
anyway, good deal. only complaint: 6cm fan may not be enough for 2 7200rpm drives.

I've been saving TV shows. Even at very low resolution you get roughly an hour per GB. At HDTV, which I can't do, it's about an hour per 6GB. Needless to say, if multimedia is your thing, even 1TB is chickenfeed.

But as I understand it, NTFS RAID Arrays can only handle 2TB total. There ways of handling larger arrays, but I have no experience trying that.

So if this device handles 2TB, I would not be surprised. But 1.5TB ?

There's a reason, but not one I understand.

It's still an VERY NICE price for a useful product.

No raid 1? That sucks.

I was just at microcenter tonight and I seem to have missed this. I was looking at the enclosures too. Must have been well-hidden.

spydermonkey said:why the confusion about the 1.5 TB max? It supports up to 750GB drives 2 x 750GB = 1.5 TB. Sure the LBA technology supports more, but that doesnt mean every chipset will support the max.

The confusion is that no modern chipset has any drive size limit. This enclosure will support drives of any size, with the aforementioned caveat about 2TB for RAID. Just ignore what is obviously marketing copy.

there was another raid enclosure that had the same raid limit (NAS) iirc. probably the same chipset. due to lack of ram you couldn't run more than 1.5GB in raid mode

right now I have 2 hdds in my desktop tower. would it be better to put one of those hdds in a enclosure like this?

nnmiller said:spydermonkey said:right now I have 2 hdds in my desktop tower. would it be better to put one of those hdds in a enclosure like this?

It depends, like everything with computers, on what you are doing with it. Would you like to expand your storage and add redundancy (RAID 1, also called mirroring) or speed (RAID 0, also called striping)? Do you have another disk to back up what is currently on your second drive? If not, then you'd be better off adding one or two new drives to this container. You could stripe the 2nd drive in your tower to another disk, but you'd be safer backing it up before you do so.

I have 5 HDs in my PC file server. Two are non-RAID storage and 3 are on a 4 port 3ware RAID 5 card (I <3 3ware). The PC runs fine, you just need to make sure your power supply & cooling can handle it if you add more disks.

=N=

Wouldn't it be a lot faster inside his desktop tower given that he would be connecting via SATA to the MB vs. connecting via USB on this box? How can you get any speed out of this given the USB bottleneck? Maybe I'm just confused...

USB Transfer Rate = ~60MB / Second
SATA Transfer Rate = ~3000MB / Second (SATAII)

IMHO, I am just about to the point of avoiding ALL enclosures that only offer USB as the only external interface. It is just WAY too slow in my experience.

I only look for enclosures that offer either eSATA or Firewire 800 (in addition to good old USB for backward compatibility to other machines).

Again... just my experience. You aren't going to get any of the real benefits of Striping with RAID out of this enclosure, so if you get this, just use JBOD or Mirroring.