External Hard Drive Enclosures?

AdmiralWeirdbeard wonders: "I've been looking to put together an external hard drive for use with my Mac Mini. Obviously, the built-in storage is not sufficient. However, I know nothing about what makes an external enclosure good or bad, and have found nothing but mixed reviews for even the best rated enclosures on Newegg and Amazon. Every model seems to have at least one person complaining of an enclosure that fried the drive through overheating. The literature I've read seems to focus on the pros and cons of the various enclosures for big (50+gb) weekly or even daily system backups. I dont need anything for regular backups, but rather just for storage of my music, movies, and other miscellaneous data. Any ideas on the pros and cons of fan/fanless, construction materials, and different brands out there?"

Comments

'Hardware RAID' external hard drive enclosure.

[Halfbaked Plan]

I have a 'hard drive enclosure' here that you connect to simply by plugging in an ethernet jack. It has provisions for 12 hotswap SCSI drives and can be configured for hardware RAID.

It's called an IBM PC Server 704, and it also has 4 pentium pro processors and some other stuff. The 'firmware' in it that provides access to it's storage to the machine 'expanded' by plugging into it is NetBSD.

It's also the size of a conventional two-drawer file cabinet. You could install it on a platform with casters and call it portable. I suppose.

Re:Firewire, all the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have twelve terabytes composed of eight 500GB 15,000RPM SCSI drives, all powered off of the bus of my 17" 1.67GHz PowerBook.

I have 67 people downloading a variety of illegal files, anime, software, movies, porn. Can't tell.

Re:Firewire, all the way.

[St. Arbirix]

You win.

Jesus.