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8 Hard Drives...

Unverrich

Unverrich

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 24, 2008
100
0
USA
Hello everyone.

I have 8 Hard drives filled with Apple TV Content. Six 1TB's and two 750GB's. They are all internal HD's and have them in 4 enclosure kits that hold two HD's each. Well, I am sick of it showing 8 HD's mounted to my Mac in sidebar so I wanted to get one big enclosure kit that can hold all 8 HD's at once and have 1 large HD.

What can I buy?

I dont want to have to erase all my HDs to format them for the RAIDs or whatever that is.

What options do I have?
 
Unverrich said:
Hello everyone.

I have 8 Hard drives filled with Apple TV Content. Six 1TB's and two 750GB's. They are all internal HD's and have them in 4 enclosure kits that hold two HD's each. Well, I am sick of it showing 8 HD's mounted to my Mac in sidebar so I wanted to get one big enclosure kit that can hold all 8 HD's at once and have 1 large HD.

What can I buy?

I dont want to have to erase all my HDs to format them for the RAIDs or whatever that is.

What options do I have?
Click to expand...

drobo?
 
Xserve raid from ebay??

Room for expansion and aluminum matches the apple tv.

Might be a tad loud....
 
with almost 8 TBs of stuff do you have a backup? If you can't find anything to fit 8 drives they make 2tb internal drives. Or maybe the Western Digital 4tb externals...
 
Without being able to erase the drives, your options are pretty slim. Even if you took all the drives and put them into an 8 bay array, they'd still appear as 8 drives without reformatting. There's probably a way of concatenating the drives through software so that they appear as one large volume, but again, that would require reformatting. In a nutshell, without reformatting the drives, I don't know of any way to make them not appear as 8 volumes.
 
Hmmm..... ok. Sounds like Im going to have to reformat them all. I just wanted to save time. Moving all that info will take forever.

One more question. I use an iMac, is there any kind of adaptor or anything to make a eSata cable to USB?
 
Unverrich said:
Reason Im asking is if I buy something with eSata only, like this...

http://www.edge10.com/digital_storage.php

I want to convert it to USB so I can use it on my iMac
Click to expand...

Keep in mind, while the adapter will work, you're dumbing down the speed of eSata to the speed of USB2.0. A big reason that you'd get that kind of a multiple bay Raid enclosure is for speed and by using USB you're throwing that advantage out the window.
 
Erendiox said:
Keep in mind, while the adapter will work, you're dumbing down the speed of eSata to the speed of USB2.0. A big reason that you'd get that kind of a multiple bay Raid enclosure is for speed and by using USB you're throwing that advantage out the window.
Click to expand...

He's got an iMac, he hasn't got that advantage anyway;)

A direct attached NAS with Gigabit Ethernet would probably be fastest you can get on an iMac wouldn't it? Otherwise it's FW800.
 
Shuttleworth said:
He's got an iMac, he hasn't got that advantage anyway;)
Click to expand...

Hehe, yea there's no way around it with an iMac. I was mostly suggesting that perhaps that enclosure is overkill for the OP's needs.

Shuttleworth said:
A direct attached NAS with Gigabit Ethernet would probably be fastest you can get on an iMac wouldn't it? Otherwise it's FW800.
Click to expand...

I believe Gigabit Ethernet is technically faster (1000Mbps vs 800Mbps), though The firewire architecture may make FW800 a more desirable choice, even with the speed difference.
 
If you want to transform multiple drives into "one large drive", you will overwrite the data, regardless of the system used.
 
Is there any 4-bay kit that does JBOD? Unlike the OP, I would wish to have individual drives show up. :D I wish to have a 8-drive setup.

As oppose to having 4 x 2-bay, a 2x 4bay setup will only need 2 power adapters instead of 4.

I've asked a CS officer in OWC, and he told me there's no 4-bay kit that support JBOD. Anyone has any recommendation?
 
orpheus1120 said:
Is there any 4-bay kit that does JBOD? Unlike the OP, I would wish to have individual drives show up.
Click to expand...

Check the links in my 1st post above, they can take 4 drives JBOD or individually. Although they are from a European retailer, I'm sure the items will be available elsewhere under a different brand name.
 
What is wrong with buying a drobo pro and a 2tb harddrive?

All you would have to do is: Copy the contents of one drive to the drive in the drobo pro, then throw that drive in there and repeat until you are left with all of your media in the drobo and an extra 750gb lying around. Then when you need more space just put out that other 750 and throw another 2tb in. It's super easy
 
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