I need an external drive enclosure that does RAID and plays well with a Mac

In My Humble Opinion
1

Paging all hardware geeks!

This was painful to try Googling since “USB” “SATA” and “RAID” are very common terms. Sometimes the human touch works better. :slight_smile:

I’ve got two one-terabyte drives that I want to put into an external enclosure that will run them in RAID 1, and let me format them as HFS+ and connect to the computer via USB or FireWire.

I can find all sorts of enclosures that hold single drives, and “NAS” enclosures that plug into the network are fairly easy to find as well, but for a variety of reasons, network-attached isn’t a good choice for my needs.

I’d like to be able to keep the cost at about $100, so the Drobo is right out. Anyone have any experience with StarTech enclosures?

2

One bump…

3

A budget of $100 is not enough to buy built-in hardware RAID (so that the host computer “sees” them as a single USB/Firewire drive).

I used to use this, but it only supports 1.5gbps instead of newer 3.0gbps:

I upgraded to this item for the 3.0gbps compatibility and support for larger drives:
http://www.sansdigital.com/mobilestor/ms2utplus.html

These are ~$200 and other similar products will have comparable prices. The RAID chip inside the enclosure really bumps the price way beyond $100.

You can try searching ebay for these items but they’re not that popular so it may difficult to find any at a discount.