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

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-an-external-drive-enclosure-that-does-raid-and-plays-well-with-a-mac/480130>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [January 6, 2009, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-an-external-drive-enclosure-that-does-raid-and-plays-well-with-a-mac/480130 "2009-01-06T20:44:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![gotpasswords](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)\
**Post date:** [January 6, 2009, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-an-external-drive-enclosure-that-does-raid-and-plays-well-with-a-mac/480130/1 "2009-01-06T20:44:56Z")

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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. 🙂

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?

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**Author:** ![gotpasswords](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)\
**Post date:** [January 8, 2009, 3:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-an-external-drive-enclosure-that-does-raid-and-plays-well-with-a-mac/480130/2 "2009-01-08T15:40:05Z")

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One bump…

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**Author:** ![Ruminator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/b9bd4f/32.png) [@Ruminator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruminator)\
**Post date:** [January 8, 2009, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-an-external-drive-enclosure-that-does-raid-and-plays-well-with-a-mac/480130/3 "2009-01-08T15:51:59Z")

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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:

> **[Cooldrives.com Home | Cooldrives](https://cooldrives.com/)**
>
> Cooldrives maintains hundreds of USB and USB to serial products in single and multi-port devices to fit every application need. With quality that is unmatched, our products have been supporting the consumer computer industry since 1997. We provide...

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