External HDD Enclosures

[Martin87]

Are there any good enclosures out there that take either a sata or ide drive and can be connect by either RJ45 or USB 2.0?

[Funkstar]

Are you looking for all that in one unit?

Enclosures will be either SATA or IDE, not both. Normal enclosures don't have ethernet ports.

If you want USB and ethernet, they you are looking at NAS/DAS hybrid boxes. I think some of te thecususints do this.

the following combinations are pretty easy to find

SATA and USB
SATA and Ethernet
IDE and USB
ISE and ethernet (although not so common)

[Martin87]

yeh but ive seen these and thought it must be possible to get them with a RJ45 connector aswell...surely?

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=465786

[arthurleung]

Akasa Integral P2 have a version that takes both SATA and IDE (cable swapping) with USB2/eSATA connection. I'm using one and it is very good (compared to my crap Seagate FreeAgent drive!)

Then you could connect the USB2 up to a NAS with USB port such as NSLU2.

I don't see any NAS that have BOTH SATA/IDE and RJ45 though.

[Funkstar]

Never seen those ones before.

Turning that into a NAS is a bit more involved than just adding an RJ45 connector. With eSATA, USB and Firewire drive boxes, the unit is just acting as a bridge between the PC and the drive. It is completely passive.

A NAS box is a little server that handles all the disk operations taking network requests and providing the data.

This is a controller boar that takes a SATA drive and makes it available over USB and Firewire:


And here the internals of a NAS box:

[peterb]

RJ45 implies a network card and that then requires an operating system behind it to control things like TCP/IP (or whatever protocol is used) stacks. USB ports are simple self contained dedicated controllers that take an input from the output of the IDE/SATA interface (a block device) and outputs it in serial form to another USB device (the computer) which then has an operating system behind it to decide how to deal with the data stream.

As a previous poster said, an enclosure with an RJ45 connector will be a NAS or DNAS device.

[s_kinton]

Are you looking for all that in one unit?

Enclosures will be either SATA or IDE, not both. Normal enclosures don't have ethernet ports.

There are a fair few enclosures out there that can take IDE or SATA.

You'll struggle to find one that has RJ45 on it though. Most connect via USB, Firewire or eSATA.

There are plenty of enclosures capable of doing IDE to RJ45, but not SATA. The SATA enclosures seem to skip RJ45 in favour of eSATA.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=508813
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=466106

[Martin87]

OK then what is better IDE or Sata when used in an external enclosure or does it not make much of a difference?

[peterb]

Define better! SATA drives seem to be slightly cheaper byte for byte and are the new thing, while IDE is effectively legacy. However IDE will be around for a while and the drives can be used in IDE enclosures when they are upgraded and replced by SATA drives.

[Martin87]

Is there going to be a significant difference in speed though?