# External HDD box



## perpetual98 (Nov 2, 2007)

I don't think it's something the average DIY person can do. It requires circuitry and logic to connect them all to 1 PC and have them appear. That's why each external enclosure has this built in. If you were really after putting multiple drives in 1 box and having them appear to your PC to be 1 large drive, you'd need RAID hardware in it, and then there are limitations to that too.

I think there are pre-built enclosures that you can pop drives into, but I don't know much about them. Check newegg.com and see if they have anything.


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## Guest (Jan 17, 2008)

You could try something like this.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817332013


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## Klint (Jul 28, 2007)

That is for ONLY SATA Drives if you have IDE or SCSI drives it will not work.:thumbsup:


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## Guest (Jan 18, 2008)

Yep that is true. More and more enclosures are going SATA only. Us PATAers are getting left in the dust.


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## NothingsLevel (Aug 27, 2006)

Klint said:


> That is for ONLY SATA Drives if you have IDE or SCSI drives it will not work.:thumbsup:


There are units that will work for IDE as well.

That said, skip USB and get an enclosure that supports Firewire (or does FW and USB) (you'll probably need a Firewire card for your PC as well). FW400 is faster than USB2 in real-world usage and is much less processor-intensive. FW800 will far surpass any USB2 speed claims.


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## diasje (Jan 16, 2008)

The best thing to do is to buy somethinl like you (poppameth) posted, its very cheap, or to build onother computer.

Now i have one computer that does that, its a old pc, with freenas software, but it takes too mutch space and energy, and i have to rely on the os (freenas) http://www.freenas.org/ 

If something goes wrong i am fxxxx.

The problem with freenas, is the file system, it does not support ntfs, it suports ext3, raiserfs (they say that its the best one).

If something goes wrong, you dont have mutch programs to recover files from this file systems.

Thanks to every one that replyed to my question.

And i am sorry for my poor english, ( I am Portuguese)

If you have problems or questions about HP computers, i can help you, i am a part of the HP e-mail suport team.

:thumbup:


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## robdville (Oct 21, 2007)

This is a half-cocked idea, but technically couldn't you use and old case( to use typical molex connections) for power, only buy the IDE to USB adapter like this: http://www.blackbox.com/images/standard/IC661A_PCS .jpg

Then connect each to a USB hub. 

You would lose all Raid functions, your windows box would basically see X drives, but it would be NTFS and have all recovery options you could install on the M$ OS.

Again, late night idea, but it should work......doesn't correct your space issues however.


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