I'm looking for recommendations for a DAS. I don't really need the features of a NAS and to save money I'm fine with a DAS. This will connect to my PC which is mainly an HTPC, but I do use it lightly for internet and home use. No gaming. I'm NOT looking for RAID with the DAS, although I'm aware most will do that. I just want it to dump ripped lossless music, DVDs, HD-DVDs and Blu-rays. I'm thinking an eSATA 4 or 5 bays, 4/5TB setup with no raid (4/5 volumes) is fine. I only have one PCI-e x1 slot left on the MOBO, so the card needs to support that (No PCI or PCI-e x16 left). I use SageTV/SageMC server and their STX-HD100 media streamer over my LAN for the content. The one I'm fairly keep on at the moment is Rosewill RSV-S4 External Quad 3.5" SATA 3G HDD 4-Bay RAID System with Full 150 Watts Power Supply / RAID 5 card - Retail or AMS DS-2350S Aluminum Black eSATA 5 bay SATA Enclosure - Retail. Anyone use these or have comments on them? And others you would recommend. TIA for any help.
Neither of those units are very good quality. If you're not after the redundancy of RAID, why not just use large disks in USB or Firewire enclosures?
Thanks for the reply. I was thinking eSATA because these will be large video files. I assumed eSATA would be a better solution to both move mass amounts of large files around and get the best performance streaming the videos off the HDD over LAN to the STX-HD100 media streamer. If that assumption is wrong I will consider Firewire.
Streaming High def can be done over 100Mbps LAN, let alone 240Mbps USB or 3Gbps eSATA. It's just the transfer rate of putting them on there in the first place that will be affected.
Thanks. Good point about the streaming. Given my needs, is there anything specifically you would recommend? I think USB is out. I may be swayed toward Firewire, but definitely prefer eSATA - or an enclosure with Firewire and eSATA.
You can get boxes with eSATA and USB both on them for reasonable money. I typically use IcyBox enclosures but I don't think you can get them in the US.
