I currently have a really crummy rackmount enclosure with three hard drives literally laying inside of it. I have a friend offering to sell me a Cineraid H458 http://www.cineraid.com/products/home_h458.htm real cheap. Can I put my drives in that enclosure and plug it into an eSATA port on my motherboard? I'm a total noob so hopefully I'm not asking something that has an obvious answer.

 

Thanks

That enclosure looks like it supports JBOD but the controller your eSATA port is connected to on your motherboard has to support port multiplication for it to work. Also, the major downside is that all disks in the enclosure would be sharing the bandwidth of the single SATA connection so parity checks or accessing data from more than one disk at a time will be really slow. In my opinion it's not really worth it.

OK, thanks. I figured I'd probably have to get a new eSATA controller anyway, and by the time I spend money on that I may be better off finding a better enclosure.

I'm not sure you're going to be able to find an external enclosure with multiple eSATA connections. The closest thing I can think of that you'll find would be getting something like a 5 in 3 drive cage, some SATA to eSATA cables and a molex to AC power adapter, plus a card that has multiple eSATA ports, and cards with more than two eSATA ports are pretty expensive. Even then it's a pretty ghetto setup.

 

In the end you're going to be better off just getting a case that better suits your needs. I don't know if you need rack mounted but this cheap $60 Norco 2U rack mounted case has mounts for four 3.5 inch drives plus a 5.25 inch bay you could fit another one in with brackets for a total of 5 drives. So unless your friend was going to sell you that Cineraid for ridiculously cheap, just upgrading to a better case will probably be cheaper.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219032

I do want rack mount, which is a downside to the Cineraid. He wants $100 for it, so I'm gonna pass. That Norco case is similar to what I have now, I was just too lazy to actually mount the drives at the time since I was hoping to find something better. I think for now I'll wait until I find something that better fits my needs. Thanks for your help!

How about a case like this one: http://m.newegg.com/Product/index?itemnumber=N82E16811165215

 

It's rack mounted and also has six 5.25 inch drive bays. That would allow you to store up to ten disks if you used 5 in 3 disk cages like this one. It allows you to fix 5 disks in 3 5.25 in drive bays. The disks go in hot swap trays which I'm guessing is what you like.

 

http://m.newegg.com/Product/index?itemnumber=N82E16817994155