Looking for an external hard drive bay with redundancy and easily expandable

[ManOfThePeople]

I'm thinking of getting an external hard drive bay. I recently had a hard drive, and I've got data all over the place on several hard drives, some internal and some external. I've currently got 8 drives, one is a 128GB SSD, a 3TB HDD, and 6 lower capacity (1TB and less) HDDs which I'll likely just pitch after copying the data.This is becoming a big hassle and I'm looking for a solution. And I've run out of SATA cables so I have some connected and others not.

I was thinking of getting an external bay. What I want is some redundancy (so if one drive fails I don't lose data) and the convenience of having all data on "one drive" (from a user standpoint). Also some performance gains would not be unappreciated. I also want it to be easily expandable by simply adding another drive.

I remember seeing drobo (which I think was the first one of these) several years ago and I looked it up again. But it's still very expensive (It's $670 for the 5D version). There are more different brands in the marketplace now though. Can someone give me some recommendations or explain the differences between them?

Also, what kind of drives should I put in them. For instance, the 5D has room for 5 drives, would I put 4 HDDs and a low capacity SSD or would I put all 5 HDDs or what?

I'm looking for the ability to have at least 12TB in there. I'd likely start off with a 3TB drive I currently have and buy a new 4TB drive for it, and add a new one as I need it.

Any advice?

 

[popatim]

For about $250 build yourself a freenas, or other free NAS software, box. For just a simple file server you dont need alot of horsepower and Freenas will run from a usb flash drive. A $50-ish motherbd, $50 cpu, $50 in ram and a $50 case would get you going. Just add drives - it can even use the ones you have.
Something like this
$59 motherbd with 8 sata3 ports: ASUS A85XM-A
$46 a4 processor @ 3.2 ghz: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113343
$40 4gb kit or Gskill ripjaws: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231425
$40 decent case comes in black too: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811146076
$50 Seasonic power supply: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151077
*you'll need some molex to sata power adapters to go beyond 4 hdd's.

You can read up on freenas and zfs drive pooling here:
http://www.freenas.org/
http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Volumes

ps - just would like to add that the larger you zfs pool grows the more ram you should have so you might want to start with a single 4gb stick and then add another when you need more.

 

[ManOfThePeople]

That's not really what I was thinking... Like, so what I want is a small box that I can attach to my computer through USB. I don't really need the NAS features, it's only something for myself. I just want something that can save my data in the case of a hard drive failure and can be viewed as a single hard drive so I can have all of my data in one place. Basically a big external hard drive, nothing more than that.

 

[popatim]

Several here
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=external+4bay&N=-1&isNodeId=1

This one also comes in white
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111194

5 bay
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111172

 

[ManOfThePeople]

Thanks.

How does this one seem? http://www.amazon.com/Mediasonic-HF2-SU3S2-ProBox-Drive-Enclosure/dp/B003X26VV4/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top (It's a bit cheaper on Amazon than on Newegg)

It says it has RAID support, I'd probably use RAID 5, right? But it's not hot swappable, so if a drive fails I can't just take it out and replace it and have everything work, right? I have to move all the data somewhere, replace the drive, and move it all back? And if I start off with only 2 drives I have to do the same to add another?