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I know several people personally who have had success with the MacGurus 'Burly Box', you can do up to 1.2TB (RAID 5) for around $1500. See the following URL:

http://macgurus.com/productpages/sata/sataguide_1. php

The 'product page' is at http://macgurus.com/productpages/sata/satakits.php

I know several people personally who have had success with the MacGurus 'Burly Box', you can do up to 1.2TB (RAID 5) for around $1500. See the following URL:

http://macgurus.com/productpages/sata/sataguide_1. php

The 'product page' is at http://macgurus.com/productpages/sata/satakits.php

The units you listed (at least the first few) look like a drive cage inside an external enclosure. I do not know where you can buy one of those pre-assembled, but you can get the three major parts easily enough and just put it together yourself.

5 drive cage (built in raid - IDE/SATA with IDE drives):
http://areca.us/products/html/ide-ide.htm

1394 to IDE bridge board:
http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg19_firewir ebridgeboards.htm

external 4 drive enclosure:
http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/scsi/mgscsien closures.php

if you don't already have drives, you could look here:
http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/Category.asp?Cat egory=15

Alternately, you could get the areca unit and mount it inside the computer - just check that you have 3 free 5.25" drive bays without any protrusions.

I recently picked up one of the SCSI to SATA areca raid units and it has worked well so far - one of the fans went south, and they are shipping out a new one.

Seems like you could save quite a bit of money by going with something like this (assuming it was SATA you're looking for):

http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/satakits .php

They have 2-, 3-, 4-, and 8-bay kits to suite your need. Get 'em with or without drives, cables, etc. The only drawback I see is the lack of a controller card (might have to go with something like the Sonnet further down the page). Then again, this may not be such of a drawback, since you're not stuck with a built-in RAID controller, in the event of it being a pile of junk.

$451 for an empty 8-bay with no cabling ain't too bad.

I've never tried one...
But these Are an option I see more and more of to allow a SATA drive to work on an ATA cable

Check out macgurus.com. They have some good solutions that seem pretty inexpensive.

We ended up with a server like these rackmounts, with 24 hot swap drive bays, Windows 200 server license, 4 hot swap power supplies (3 live, one redundant), two 3Ware SATA 12 port cards (so no redundancy in controllers), no drives, for about $6,200. We purchased from biz.tigerdirect.com, who were very competitive, and beat any other price I could find to throw at them, and then threw in a 3 year 24x7 warranty. We got 12 250GB drives from newegg.com, because their drive prices just can't be beat. We went with RAID 5 with one drive as a hot spare, so we have 2.5 TB of storage.

Now, this isn't the fastest horse on the block by any means, but we aren't serving databases or working directly with this data, we just needed gobs of reliable storage. I'm happy with this so far.

For desktop solutions, we ended up with a modification to MacGuru's roll your own SATA RAID. We added the internal enclosure from Addonics so that we could have hot swap drive bays. This also means extra bays, since the enclosure reduces the space the drives take up. Also, it's easier to install these bays than it is to screw rails on every drive. O.k., so screwing rails isn't a big deal, but at work, my time is money, so there it is. We used the Addonics RAID cards, which seem to perform nicely, and these 8 port SATA port adapter (scroll down) let's you connect the external array to your main desktop with minimal fuss.

We're very happy with these desktop RAIDS that operate at a very respectable speed - Our GIS folks need desktop access to terabytes of data for their processing, and we're too cheap to buy them workstations. This has been a very cost-effective alternative for us. Hope this helps.

We ended up with a server like these rackmounts, with 24 hot swap drive bays, Windows 200 server license, 4 hot swap power supplies (3 live, one redundant), two 3Ware SATA 12 port cards (so no redundancy in controllers), no drives, for about $6,200. We purchased from biz.tigerdirect.com, who were very competitive, and beat any other price I could find to throw at them, and then threw in a 3 year 24x7 warranty. We got 12 250GB drives from newegg.com, because their drive prices just can't be beat. We went with RAID 5 with one drive as a hot spare, so we have 2.5 TB of storage.

Now, this isn't the fastest horse on the block by any means, but we aren't serving databases or working directly with this data, we just needed gobs of reliable storage. I'm happy with this so far.

For desktop solutions, we ended up with a modification to MacGuru's roll your own SATA RAID. We added the internal enclosure from Addonics so that we could have hot swap drive bays. This also means extra bays, since the enclosure reduces the space the drives take up. Also, it's easier to install these bays than it is to screw rails on every drive. O.k., so screwing rails isn't a big deal, but at work, my time is money, so there it is. We used the Addonics RAID cards, which seem to perform nicely, and these 8 port SATA port adapter (scroll down) let's you connect the external array to your main desktop with minimal fuss.

We're very happy with these desktop RAIDS that operate at a very respectable speed - Our GIS folks need desktop access to terabytes of data for their processing, and we're too cheap to buy them workstations. This has been a very cost-effective alternative for us. Hope this helps.

Here are a few Mac upgrade links....

http://www.newertech.com/

http://www.sonnettech.com/

http://www.XLR8YourMac.com/

http://www.macgurus.com/