Novac's eSATA and USB drive towers: 4.5TB of possible storage

Novac of japan launches some a couple of big empty cases to host the 3.5-inch SATA disks of your choice. The NV-HS372S supports up to five disks and connects to your PC over eSATA. No eSATA, no problem, the adapter card is included in the ¥59,800 (about $517) price tag. The ¥29,800 (about $258) NV-HD600U supports up to six disks and connects to your computer over the more traditional, but slower USB 2.0 interface. With 3.5-inch disks currently maxing-out at 750GB (with 1TB expected this summer), well, you do the porn storage math. Both enclosures rock RAID 0/1 support and ship starting 19 December in Japan.

[Via Impress]

Read -- eSATA enclosure
Read -- USB 2.0 enclosure

[Donielle @ Dec 8th 2006 9:21AM]

I need that i would use that to store my ummmmm ..... files yea files

[Samuel McConnell @ Dec 8th 2006 9:27AM]

Of course, there's no middle ground in the Firewire-800 that I'd like to see...

[Mark @ Dec 8th 2006 9:42AM]

They're coming down in price pretty quickly, but with that amount of data I'd like to have RAID 5 on the thing. I think I'm looking for more of a NAS device though.

[ffresh @ Dec 8th 2006 9:44AM]

This would be so totally sweet. and expensive. oh well.

[LD @ Dec 8th 2006 10:08AM]

Great design, supports RAID1 with only 5 drives...

[Jonny @ Dec 8th 2006 10:30AM]

No Raid-5? No Thanks.

[PA Scott @ Dec 8th 2006 10:51AM]

No fault tolerance? geeze

[Jonny @ Dec 8th 2006 11:18AM]

Raid-1 is fault tolerant?

[LikesGadgetsWillTravel @ Dec 8th 2006 11:22AM]

Useless without RAID-5. For that money, I'd get an Infrant. Or, for a few bucks more, a 12port 3ware card and a server board.

[Andir3.0 @ Dec 8th 2006 12:06PM]

Just wondering here, but theoretically, that should work with the PS3 via USB. Could be a good external case to drop some standard size drives in to store your data on.

I wished it was Raid5, or has some capability for NAS, but it's a start.

[Brett Kelley @ Dec 8th 2006 12:45PM]

Forgive me if I am mistaken, but I was pretty sure that SATA drives aren't really up to the duty cycle of that of a server environment, whereas ATA and SCSI are.

[wintermute @ Dec 8th 2006 1:19PM]

Raid 1 with 5 or 6 drives? I guess if you like wasting your money on 3 extra drives to get half the raw storage, that's a fantastic idea. No RAID 5, no sale.

[Andir3.0 @ Dec 8th 2006 2:53PM]

The drive mechanics are the same, the only difference is the interface. The only bad thing I've heard about SATA is crosstalk if you bundle a bunch of SATA cables together, but I'm not sure if that's as big of a problem as it was made out to be (ie: does it happen only on long cables or situations where the cables are all wound up together?)

[dan @ Dec 8th 2006 3:49PM]

ATA Drives are crap. SCSI is the only thing you really want in a enterprise environment. Some of the new scsi drives claim enterprise level but they're no where near scsi levels.

[Bodlar @ Dec 8th 2006 3:35PM]

Brett, actually it's not a matter of duty cycles on SATA vs SCSI, but the fact that SCSI has the hard drive controller on the drive. This takes the load away from the processor for directing the drive, increasing speed in high volume environments.

[Andir3.0 @ Dec 8th 2006 4:13PM]

Yeah, because the NAS I want to install in my home needs to be able to serve up thousands or millions of file requests per second. Just because the device would not be used in global network situations doesn't mean it doesn't have a place in life. SATA is "good enough" for your standard home market. The difference you would get between SCSI and SATA would not be worth the price for your normal home user.

So why would the normal home user want a RAID setup? Because too many times, I've had my uncle, parents, and friends ask me to try to restore files from drives that fail on them because they didn't have a backup solution that was affordable. I'm almost to the point of buying something like this for them. RAID 5 brings redundancy at a reduced cost (comparing mirrored drives and tape drives that store hundreds of Gigs.) Considering that you can also expand your RAID Array in the future provides you a nice scalable way to have "affordable" redundancy. Isn't that what RAID is about anyway?