[seank]

I am planning on building my own external multibay firewire enclosure for use with my Mac. I am hoping someone can give me some help or correct me if my assumptions are wrong.

My plan is simply to use a PC case with a power supply and add in one or more firewire bridge boards. Am I naive to think that this would be all there is to it? Am I missing something?

I have a bunch of "old" hard disks sitting around and this seems like a cheap yet effective way of utilizing them. One or more bays could be equipped with a mobile tray system, thus making it extremely easy to pop drives in and out for backup purposes.

Has anyone done this? Will it work? What am I missing?

Thanks,

Sean

[rag on a muffin]

i dont see anything missing. looks like your good!

[scottiB]

Check out this thread:

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...hreadid=202850

A 4-bay SCSI case like the one mentioned is on eBay right now.

[seank]

Thanks for the replies.

I think I am still leaning towards using PC case for my firewire drive enclosure. That will give me room to expand.

I am planning to use the Antec Sonata case:

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20030804/case-06.html

It appears to be very quiet. Every external hard drive I have ever had was way too loud. In addition to being quiet, the extra room over a traditional drive enclosure should prevent over heating.

I am not needing excessive speed or raid features. I just want flexible backup storage.

I plan to outfit at least one of the bays with a removable tray system so I can pop drives in and out for off site storage.

Again, thanks for the responses.

-Sean

[starman]

So let me get this straight - it's just a case with a FW card, power, and the drives? The card does all the work? Do you have a link to the card because I'm also looking into this.

MIke