On Jan 12, 2008 7:20 AM, Jordan Peacock <hewhocutsdown at gmail.com> wrote: > Well, after much looking and research I've determined to put together a > 4-disk SATA external enclosure, and use RAID 5 to get 3/4 of the capacity > with a parity drive. Are you looking for an enclosure that specifically has an e-sata interface, or are you also interested in enclosures that have a SCSI or fibrechannel interface that use SATA drives? Are you looking for an enclosure that does hardware RAID or an enclosure that just provides a multi-drive connection? (JBOD) FWIW, I would urge you to reconsider your decision to use RAID5, if your data is important. I work for a local company that specializes in storage solutions, and over the last several years the market has driven us into selling SCSI/Fibre to SATA RAIDs, and I believe that the market demand for RAIDs with SATA drives is what really drove RAID hardware designers to include RAID6. SATA drives were not intended to be RAID drives. They were intended to be the next generation of desktop commodity drive. All too often, we see drives fail (often due to bad blocks) during the rebuild of a RAID after a different drive failed. If you are running RAID6, that's no problem. You have two drives worth of parity data, and your rebuild keeps going, though you'll need to replace the other failed drive once that rebuild is complete. If you're running RAID5, your rebuild just failed. Your data is gone. Sorry. I hope it wasn't important. If it was, Ontrack will help you to discover just how important (in $) your data really was. > Anybody done the same, and if so, what would you recommend for an enclosure? > How is the power consumption typically? Any pros/cons I should concern > myself with? That really depends on your budget, and also on your answer to my first couple questions. As far as RAID hardware goes, you usually get what you pay for. Power consumption would probably be somewhere in the 200-600W range, depending on the enclosure. I hope that was helpful, but I didn't want to turn my response into an advertisement. -- Justin Kremer