Storage has countless faces these days, including numerous useful accessories. We found fives products to help you flexibly install, connect, silence and manage 2.5" and 3.5" hard drives.

Anybody know about a rock solid external enclosure for a single hard drive.  The Scythe Kama Connect leaves the hard drive vulnerable and looks bad for home use.  Most of the external enclosures I've seen are pretty cheezy and lightweight.  I saw the "Metal Gear" enclosures online, but I haven't seen one in person.
 
I'm esepcially interested in easy access.  I don't want to have to unscrew a dozen little screws to swap out a hard drive.
 
The goal is to have two of these, so I can leave a bunch of hard drives on the shelf at home, swap in any particular drive, toss it in a laptop shoulder bag, and head out to a client or friend's house.
 
I really thought this article would cover this, but it was conspicuous by it's abscence.

If you want a good solution grab any sata internal rack system and get lots of caddies and put all your drives in....swap as you see fit...and get a USB2/ESATA external CD/DVD box and install the same rack(rail) in it.....then when you go to a friends you bring that...and at home you have the best speed possible....
 
Rail for racks get 2
 
Drive Racks get as many as you need....you get 1 with each of the above...and do not hot plug usb.....remove....power down...insert....power up...
 
As for the external CD/DVD 5.25inch usb/esata device....keep an eye out...i have not seen many....but if you want it i am sure you can find the parts to make it work....
 
EDIT....
as for the article....it found it was ok....i never did see that 4 2.5 device before....SWEET....the Kama is an excellent tool for a work bench....no power down just plug...back up...move on...i have a PATA one....works good....

Hi all.
I've been looking into this Scythe Kama type of interface for a while now.
I have an empty Mac Mini case and I'm interested in putting a 3.5" HD and slimline DVD in it.
Due to size restrictions I need a small interface to convert SATA to either USB or Firewire. The item described caught my eye as it could be used with SATA and IDE at the same time. (I'm thinking SATA HD and IDE DVD)
Can the authors (or anyone else for that matter) tell me it's size and whether or not it would accept a SATA and IDE cable. This would allow me to hide the unit in the case rather than have it sticking out the back on the end of the SATA drive.
 
Many thanks
Steve

most devices like that do not allow you to run both...i can NOT be sure on that one....but with so many out there i am almost sure they are all the same....
 
Maybe you will be better with a unit that will run sata with a cable....due to the size restrictions....
 

nGear USB2.0 to SATA/IDE
get this and tuck it away...and use the cable to go to your drive....as far as cd/dvd....maybe a slimline sata drive with another one of these and a small usb hub all crammed into that small case.....you will need power for your hard drive and cd rom...unless its ide....then you would have the adpater hanging from it...with another adapter...so you will need a plug(12 and 5 volts....a molex[hard drive plug] will work well) on the mac mini case to use for this....
 
if you are not concerned with size/look...maybe this?
 

Mediasonic DW567
The price is a little high....but it will take a cd/dvd rom and a hard drive....it also has a card reader...The lack of a fan makes it unsuitable for 24/7 operation...

A couple of those quadra packs would work great in a stacker case with one of those fancy areca raid cards.
 
It's just a shame the 200GB drives don't work with it because of the drive height. 160GB x 4 only gets 640MB, smaller than a single largest desktop drive.
 
If you're going to be mounting hard drives into 5.25" bays for RAID, you would be better off with another Addonics product:
 
Addonics Disk Array
 
In the same space you would use for two quadra packs or 1280MB worth of 5400RPM notebook drive space, you could fit three 750GB 7200RPM drives (almost double the capacity), with RAID, hotswap and a much-easier-to-replace 80mm cooling fan. With the price of a 160GB laptop drive running at ~$120 and 750GB desktop drives now down to $289, it is also about a hundred bucks cheaper to populate.
 
And if you've got bays galore, fitting five desktop drives into the space of three 5.25" openings is a very good way to use that space.
 
Another interesting product I read about a few months back was this:
 
The 12-drive RAID storage box
 
When you consider the price (now $799 on Newegg.com) it's a pretty neat way of adding an extra 9TB of storage, and if you remove the rackmount ears and handle, you can even place it underneath your slimline HTPC and use it as a massive media library!!!