I have a need for SATA rack enclosure that fits in a normal 5.25" slot. It also has to be USB on the backplane. This will obviously be slower however hot swap USB is pretty much fool proof whereas as hot swap SATA is anything but.

 

In my travels I will post links here of potential products.

 

If anyone finds this interesting and/or finds alternative products I am sure the community will appreciate your posts as well.

 

http://www.coolgear.com/productdetails1.cfm?sku=CGS-35UKS&cats=&catid=168,170,161

$23.98

SATA Mobile Rack with USB 2.0 Bridge Board Built In

Also considering SATA stage racks as an external but slick solution

 

 

I like this design for an external unit.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816215055

 

and this one because it has the card reader in it.

I like the idea of having the SD card for my boot and a compact flash for the custom tree.

I have not tried it, however I want to.

http://www.surpluscomputers.com/348442/sabrent-sata-2.5-3.5-hard.html

 

Can these be used in an unRAID server, or are you considering these for your desktop?

unRAID can use them just not automagically

Interesting...how can unraid use external usb drives? Any performance metrics on it?

not in the array though only as it was intended as a drop in pull out USB drive

So you could copy files from the external drive to the array, but the external itself wouldn't be protected?

pretty much

Would/could  it show up as a share?

Would/could  it show up as a share?

If you install the unMENU add-on, ( from here) you can use the buttons on its disk-management page to mount the drive and then share it on the LAN.

 

By default it is read-only, but you can also install the ntfs-3g driver (using the package manager in unMENU) and then edit the unmenu.conf file (using the config file editor in unMENU) to make the mount read/write for NTFS drives.

 

 

Above I've mounted a USB drive.  i've also got a button to share it on the LAN. (It is not "unioned" into user-shares, but exists as its own share)

 

Below, a user mounted and shared ALL his existing NTFS drives to evaluate unRAID on his old hardware.  He had NO protected drives at all:

 

Once the new Unraid beta comes out, I will try it. Beta 5....