Looking for a 4 bay sata enclosure....

Hi friends,

I have a lot of random sata drives which I need to access from my new iMac. I don't need any wireless capability, just a good old fashioned lead to and from the computer.

I'm assuming firewire is faster than USB 2.0 but there are so many options and tech-y terms I thought I'd ask the experts what to get.


Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Firewire is MUCH faster than USB. I cloned a drive through USB and it took 4 hours. With Firewire 800 it took just under an hour. The new Thunderbolt ports would be faster as well, but the drives are pricey.

Don't know that you're going to find a 4 bay enclosure that's not designed for RAID. Some, not all, of them can be set up as JBOD (just a bunch of disks), but you're going to be paying for the RAID capability with them.

If you only need rare access to any individual drive and can stand setting each one up when you do - just go with something like this - has FW800 for connecting to your Macs and eSATA for your Windows boxes.

If you're wanting semi-permanent access and they'll only be attached to your Mac, you might want to look at individual cases with FW800 and then daisy chain them.

Having said the above, if you're up to 4 external drives with stored data on them, it's probably past time you start looking at investing in a RAID device.

Try the D-Link DNS-343 D-Link Products - DNS-343 - ShareCenter 4-Bay Network Storage Enclosure I like mine.

Cooldrive Homepage from CoolDrives.com

Bob_Stan said:

Firewire is MUCH faster than USB. I cloned a drive through USB and it took 4 hours. With Firewire 800 it took just under an hour. The new Thunderbolt ports would be faster as well, but the drives are pricey.

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Don't forget about Firewire 400 as well. Still a good clip faster than USB 2...

bobtomay said:

Don't know that you're going to find a 4 bay enclosure that's not designed for RAID. Some, not all, of them can be set up as JBOD (just a bunch of disks), but you're going to be paying for the RAID capability with them.

Maybe, maybe not. There are quite a few that an be used as just plain drive enclosures and since OSX is RAID capable you can let it perform the functionality without paying a ton extra to the drive maker.

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