Killer Mass Storage Deals!

[miklorsmith]

http://www.eaglebit.com/newsletter/3-27-2008/index.html

I bought two of these cases about a month ago for the same price but with 500 GB drives.  The cases are well-built, fan cooled, and internal drives are replaceable.  Two of these on your server and you should be good forever.  Of course you'll need two more to back it all up, off-site.   

This is exactly what I'm doing with my setup.

[richidoo]

Looks good Mike... Nice case!! Lots of storage for little money. Lets see, that's $0.15 per GB. I once paid a $1 / MB back in 93, it was a great deal. haha 
Rich

[ik632]

These type of cases are starting to pop up here and there. There are several out there that are eSATA which have two drives internally. Some even have built in mirroring or striping so you set the jumper on the back and let the hardware mirror (for half of the space) or stripe (for twice the space but with increased performance).

The ideal setup for me would be to have an eSATA card in the computer (with 2 eSATA ports) and then hook it to two of these in striped mode (each drive is setup striping) and then mirror across the two drives for backup. The only thing I'm not sure about is if there's a single drive failure in the enclosure, if it has any type of notification. I think there's an actual RAID level value for this setup (maybe 5?) but you could have either enclosure totally fail or one drive in either fail without data loss. The data loss scenario would be loss of corresponding drives in both cases (so drive 1 in both would fail).

The server setup that I'm contemplating building will have 4 internal SATA drives, but this would be an awesome upgrade option to present to users.

[miklorsmith]

1 TB for $195!

http://www.eaglebit.com/newsletter/4-7-2008/index.html

I just ordered me another.   

[richidoo]

Is the fan quiet Mike?

[BillC]

My question exactly !  This price is too good to be true... 

If the fan were as quiet as my Maxtor unit, there would be no discernable noise, which would be very nice.   

The only slight disadvantage I see is the size; this is really two stacked .5 TB drives, so it is 5 inches high.  Striping would nicely improve file transfer speed, but the ability to do this is not mentioned.

Bill C

[miklorsmith]

I have two of them running on top of my computer at work and they are quieter than the computer.  Even at home I have two and they're quieter than my Dell XPS 400 which is actually a very quiet box.  I don't have any dB measurements but I think they would be quiet enough for most audio racks.  They don't have any mechanical elements to the sound either, no clunking or metallic character.  I'm completely happy with them.

They have burly rubber feet too which is nice.  I just measured - they're just a hair under 3" high standing on their rubber feet.  Horizontal dimensions are about the same as any other external drive.

[lonewolfny42]

Mike....

I did come across this......

[miklorsmith]

Nice work, Chris.  Hopefully none of my drive cases will break.