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Non-RAID Multi-IDE HD Firewire Enclosures?

Posted by Cliff on from the an-outhouse-for-your-disks dept.

Chris Jones asks: "I am finding that with all the large IDE harddrives becoming so cheap lately, I now have 4-5 nice sized IDE drives lying around my home office. Does anyone know of firewire enclosures that support multiple harddrives and are NOT RAID? RAID seems to quadruple the cost of enclosures... I just want a box with a power supply that can handle 4 IDE drives as well as the 4 Oxford 911 firewire bridge boards. On a different note, does anyone know if the Oxford 911 bridge board supports master and slave drives? If it does, then I would only need two boards for my 4 IDE drives, so if someone currently makes something like this, please point me to them! I would expect to pay $35 per Oxford board, $50 for the power supply and $50 for the enclosure... $15 for a cooling fan Does this sound reasonable?"

4 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. Not cheaper by mnmn · · Score: 3, Insightful

    IDE harddisks getting cheaper?? Its lowest cost is stable at about $100CDN. Its getting cheaper per megabyte, but not just cheaper.

    --
    "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
    1. Re:Not cheaper by lowtekneq · · Score: 3, Insightful

      IDE harddisks getting cheaper?? Its lowest cost is stable at about $100CDN. Its getting cheaper per megabyte, but not just cheaper.

      With IDE/EIDE drives about $1 per gigabyte, prices are going "down". By that I mean for their size. Price always stays in the same field when new hard drives come out (you can see this with video cards too). So no, that 120GB harddrive isn't under $50 yet, but it the model below probably is.

      --
      Carpe meam simiam!
  2. Speed by GiMP · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just so you're aware, one firewire bus can only do 400Mbps. You might want more than 100Mbps (~12MB/s) per drive. :)

    Personally, I'd go with buying an empty drive chassis with 5.25" drive bays.. then create a firewire backplane and use those ide drive caddies for holding the disks.

    The only question is how many firewire controllers do you wish to have ? :)

    1. Re:Speed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Well, it's not likely that he's going to have more than one or two drives transferring data at a time anyway.