Fully SATAI and SATAII Capable
MacGurus has selected and bundled together the necessary components for
you to assemble your own 2, 4, 5 or 8 drive SATA enclosure for Macs or PCs.
Premium internal SATA
cables
with backplane adapter plates and those great Shielded neoprene External SATA
cables are packaged
along with either our Burly 2 Bay, 4 Bay, 5 Bay or 8 Bay black enclosures.
These are the best components we can get for the task.
Drives:
We highly recommend the beastly fast Hitachi 7K250
and T7K500 and any of the Seagate lineup on our
SATA Hard Drive page. These are the best performing, most
reliable drives on the market today, leading in most
every
performance
catagory the 7200
RPM drive
class.
With
a 5 year
warranty and class leading performance the Seagate drives are
our favorites. Hitachi leads our list for performance and carries a
standard 3 year warranty. Western
Digital 10K Raptors for a high octane scratch RAID arrays are available
as well, giving you a ready to order solution. These kits have everything
you need short of the host
card and the data to store on them.
NOTE: Kits incorporating Seagate 7200.10 drives will not work
with Firmtek Seritek 4 port host cards.
SATA is the superior drive specification of the day. Reliable, easily
installed and capable of tremendous performance, this is the way to increase
your external storage for a fraction of the cost of most any other solution.
Host Cards:
You will also need a host card solution to go along with your enclosure
choice. There is a wide range of choices in host cards today. These cards
give us a great variety of solutions for great, simple and amazingly fast
external storage. If you are not sure which card will fit your computer,
please read our SATA
Host Card Guide to help you make your selection.
In our opinion, this is the replacement for Firewire when it come to external
hard drives. No more bridge boards, slow speeds and unreliable support.
External SATA is exactly the same performance as internal SATA!
Cabling:
Most external host cards currently available have eSATA connectors.
Be sure to select either the 1 meter or 2 meter eSATA-eSATA cables when
ordering your Burly. The Burly enclosure has eSATA connectors.
Some of the current host cards may not have enough, or any, external
ports for the number of drives you will be needing. In this case you
will need a method
to
route
your
cables
out
the
back
of
your Mac.
Many
users
currently
just
run
the
cables
in
through
an
empty
PCI
slot
and
attach
to
the internal ports of their SATA host card. That works OK as long
as the cables don’t get pulled on. Internal connectors aren’t
well designed for that type of abuse. Other users modify the metal plate
on the card by
drilling holes or cutting slots to allow the cables to route out through
the same
slot as the card. Be aware that card manufacturers may not accept warranty
responsibility for cards modified this way.
MacGurus recommended installation is to run the PCI
8 Port Adapter
with however many cables running in to the host card. This uses up an additional
PCI slot
but is clean and neat and safe. The eight port adapter is just
a riser card with eight internal SATA connections directly attached to eight
external connectors. Cables are
necessary to run from the adapter to the host
card and
are sold separately.
Be sure to select eSATA - Type A External Cables when purchasing your
Burly if you will use the PCI 8 Port Adapter.
Note: eSATA connections,
originally known as the Type B+ connector, are starting to be seen on host
cards for both PCs and Macs.
This new external SATA specification uses a different connector that unfortunately
looks so similar as to be easily mistaken on first glance for the more
common Type A SATA connection. Because of that you will need to pay particular
attention to the cables you select with your Burly. You can select between
1 meter and 2 meter cables. If you use a host card with a TYPE A connector,
be sure to choose the eSATA-TYPEA option on your cable selection.
The Burly enclosure has eSATA connectors.
At this time the manufacturer of eSATA cables and connectors
has a monopoly and is charging extra high prices for eSATA components.
This both raises
the prices you will pay for cables and cards utilizing those connectors
and gains the manufacturer some animosity from us. With a little justice
in the world this commitment to greed will reap them some competition
and hopefully a lesson learned. The market should make a correction
to this sorry state and bring these cables back to a more realistic
cost basis. Unfortunately we have no control or knowledge of when that
will happen. Ironically, this same manufacturer knows no peers when
it comes to quality, so we'll temper our anger with the knowledge that
at the least we are getting the best cables on the planet.
***One item to note, SATA drives manufacturered by Seagate and
the new Maxtor
DiamondMax10 and MaxLineIII drives ONLY have
15 pin SATA power connections. These enclosures have 4 pin Molex power
plugs. MacGurus now supplies SATA Y Power Adapters for all SATA
Kits on this page.
Be sure to check out our online SATA External Installation
Guide.
The most massive storage enclosure we have today. Capable of using the
largest SATA drives, up to 6 TeraBytes of storage possible.
Kits
come bare of drives, so you can use your own, or packaged with the great performing
Hitachi or Seagate drives.
Three 80mm enclosure fans provide plenty of air circulation for reliable
drive life.
Most external host cards currently
available have eSATA connectors.
Be sure to select either the 1 meter or 2 meter eSATA-eSATA cables when
ordering your Burly. The Burly enclosure has eSATA connectors.
This enclosure is perfect for
use with the HighPoint RocketRAID card. While MacGurus doesn't carry
that product due to Highpoint’s
distribution policies, we do recommend the 8 Bay Burly as the companion
enclosure for it.
The enclosure has three 80mm cooling fans
300 watt power supply,
115-230 volt
Dimensions: 7"w x 18"d x 17"h
Proudly
Kit
includes the parts necessary to assemble a 2 drive enclosure. Order any 2 
4 Drive SATA Case Kits
5 Drive SATA Case Kits
