I currently have fourteen hard drives attached to my computer. Nine are used for photos. There is one drive for my Raw files, another for finished Tiff’s in categories from A-L and a third drive for finished Tiff’s in categories from L-Z. I have found myself in a position that in the not-so-distant future, I will be in need for another drive as one the two drives that hold the finished Tiff’s will be getting full. Each of the photo drives backs up on alternating days to two additional drives. That makes nine drives in all. I have a hard drive for my operation system and data files, another for backups, two additional drives for miscellaneous files such as video and movies and a drive that I call my “spare.”
My computer case will hold five drives and I used to have five in there. I found that if I needed to replace one it was too much of a hassle to take the case apart and I also felt that the extra drives added to the load on the cases power supply. I decided to buy multi-drive external enclosures. My first enclosure holds two hard drives and I have had it for many years and have never had a single issue with it. The only downside to the case is that it has a separate output cable for each drive. When I was looking for a four bay enclosure, I wanted to find a unit that only had one cable out for all four drives. An enclosure like this uses a port-multiplier. It allows the computer to see the four bay enclosure as four separate hard drives or to utilize RAID and have the enclosure seen as one large drive. I opted for four separate hard drives.
My first two four bay enclosures were from Addonics. They were mini storage towers. There were a little bit of a hassle to get working and putting the drives in was a chore as each drive had its own power and data cable. My hands did nit fit into the case and I did my share of swearing during the installation. Each of the drives sits on a set of rails and is held in place by four screws. The enclosures are not inexpensive (compared to others which I now own). When I purchased the towers, they were selling for about $230 USD. I saw on the web site today that they are now $169 USD.
Both enclosures worked okay for a few years and then one developed a problem in the port multiplier and the computer could not see the drives. I purchased a replacement port multiplier for $89 USD and installed it in the enclosure and all was well again. A few months ago, the power supply went in the second enclosure and I was not happy. The power supply was more than have the cost of the enclosure so I felt that it was time to look for a new supplier. I went to my favorite place to buy computer equipment: NewEgg. I looked at their external enclosures and settled on a unit made by Rosewill. I read user reviews and one of the downsides to the reviews was the included PCI Express RAID controller card. Since I already had a card installed in my machine, I was worried about it so I placed my order for a Rosewill RSV-S4-6G SATA 150 & 300 4 x Hot-Swappable 3.5″ Drive Bays RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 5+spare, Spanning and JBOD. The second reason for ordering a Rosewill enclosure was because I already owned a couple of their two bay enclosures at work and really liked their quality. I found out after ordering this enclosure that it was discontinued but that didn’t bother me either as I hoped to have it for many years.
When I opened the box, I was impressed that it was a totally tool less enclosure. I was also happy to see that the drives plugged into the board at the back of the enclosure. No more messing with power and data cables. Hooray!!!! I had four drives installed in less than five minutes. I plugged in the power cable, attached the sata cable to the computer and turned on the external enclosure. As it came on, I saw each of the drives recognized. I was done. I was really impressed. There are lights on the front of the enclosure that indicate power to the unit, connection to the computer and activity to each drive. The only downside to the case is that the power switch is in the back but since I hardly ever turn it off, it really didn’t matter to me.
Before I go further, it’s important to understand that it is necessary to have a controller card in your computer that supports a port multiplier or your motherboard has to support port multipliers and have the ability to connect the sata cable from the external enclosure to the computer’s motherboard. Here is an example of a PCI-Express controller card that supports port multipliers. All the cards that I looked at were PCI-Express so make sure that you have an open slot on your motherboard before buying. You can find external enclosures that work with USB but the transfer speed of USB is slower than SATA.
This is a Koutech IO-PESA220 PCI Express x 1 Low Profile Ready SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Controller Card. I found it at NewEgg for $29.99 USD with free shipping. It has a good rating. The Rosewill came with a card like this that can be used for external enclosures with port multipliers whether they are used for a RAID system or JBOD (just a bunch of disks) system. The JBOD system is what I use.
I am not endorsing this card as I have never owned one. I am just showing it as an example of a necessary item with external enclosures that have port multipliers.
A few weeks after installing the Rosewill external enclosure, I had the opportunity to install the RAID/Port Multiplier card that came with the enclosure.
Over the past few weeks, I have been copying CD’s containing many of my underwater images that I scanned from slides years ago. I am sure that I have a few thousand images on CD and I have been getting worried about the CD’s going bad. It is good that I started this as I have already found a half dozen disks that I can no longer read. I still have the original slides and I can rescan them but it will take a lot more time than copying them from a CD to a hard drive. I have also come to realize that I am going to have to add another trio of hard drives to my system to equalize my tiff files.
I went back to NewEgg and looked at the external enclosures. My Rosewill enclosure has been discontinued so I looked at other options. One of the reason that I love NewEgg so much is the customer comments and product ratings. I rely heavily on the opinions of people who actually have purchased the products and are using them.
I liked what I saw about a Sans Digital 4 Bay eSATA Port Multiplier JBOD Tower Storage Enclosure TR4M+BNC enclosure. It cost $104.00 USD with free shipping. I decided to give it a try. I ordered it along with a 2TB Hitachi hard drive. When it arrived, I was as pleased with the enclosure as I was with the Rosewill. This enclosure also is a tool less installation and has no internal cables to deal with like the Rosewill enclosure.
I installed the 2tb drive and attached the enclosure to the Rosewill RAID card. I ran into my first glitch. The drive in the enclosure was not recognized. The lights for power, computer connection and drive activity came on but the drive was not recognized by the computer. I tried restarting the computer and the Rosewill RAID bios recognized the drive but no-go with the computer. I thought that it might be a driver issue for the RAID card so I went to the Rosewill site and found a driver for Windows 7 for when the RAID card would be used with a JBOD system. I installed the driver in Device Manager, restarted the computer and all was well.
I am not ready for to rearrange my tiff files but I am going to wait until I purchase two more hard drives for the Sans Digital enclosure. My Addonics enclosure that failed sits on a shelf waiting to be used for spare parts for the one that is still working. If the Addonics enclosure fails, I know where I will be looking for a new external enclosure.
© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.
