Well, 2TB is a lot, but is also not, at the same time. When dealing with a lot of large multimedia files, those terabytes can quickly dwindle. For the past couple of years we have been buying 1TB drives, and they have been treating us quite well; in the past few months, however, 2TB drives pricing has bottomed out and become the best value. So it's time to get some more space.
Where do you put all these drives? I have four data drives, plus one system drive in my computer case at the moment, and six externals connected via USB. I could squeeze some more into my case, perhaps slap a SATA controller in there for added ports, and convert some external five and a quarter bays into hard drive cages, but that seems like a lot of work, especially with the advent of inexpensive external devices, such as NAS and USB/eSATA enclosures.
I settled on the four bay MediaSonic HFJ2-SU2 enclosure, which offers me four drive bays with a simple USB interface and JBOD functionality. The JBOD thing is new to me, and am glad that one of it's modes is to allow the computer to recognize each drive as it's own. Perhaps down the road, when drive letters are becoming scarce, I would experiment with the other modes, such as four drives becoming two.
Unpacking the device leads to a structurally sound, not-cheap feeling product. I'm sure more expensive devices could offer a few more luxuries, but this definitely does the trick. You open the front door, and you are met with a metal grate; pinch this out and you can slide the drives in. The drives get plastic handles with foam on the front, so when the metal grill is replaced, the connections are made that much tighter, and I imagine vibration would be reduced.
The fan is located on the back, with some front ventilation ports which I assume will have air pulled through and exhausted out. The fan has various modes - I've left it on 'auto' - but I'm not concerned about heat: I always buy 5400 RPM "green" drives as I don't need blazing speeds to access files (my system drive is a speedier 7200RPM). It's not particularly noisy; in fact I've noticed my PS3 is noisier than my computer and drives, but that could be because it's closer. But if you were looking at a bunch of these, running off a server and in a different room, noise would be a non-issue. Power them off when not in use and you are laughing.
Connect the power, connect to the computer via USB, power everything on and you're rolling like you've just installed drives into your computer and connected them. Initalize them, format them if you want (who does anything more than a quick format on multiple TB's these days anyhow?) and you have yourself some inexpensive storage. Buying OEM internal drives and putting them into these enclosures should save you not only money (as opposed to multiple externals), but power, less cable clutter and less headache. And the way the drives are, if the enclosure dies, the drives are easily salvageable.
My particular model does not support RAID and I'm happy it doesn't. I want to maximize space and worry about backups myself. The types of files I'm storing, and how much space they take up, makes it impractical and expensive to do proper backups anyway: prioritize what you need to backup and be realistic. I'll post more about that later on as I move into cloud-based backups. One last thing: this product scores huge bonus points for including a very sturdy screwdriver with it!
Embedded slideshow below, click on it to be brought to the full size images.
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