While I have quite a bit of collective space left on my unRAID array, I do not have much space left on a couple of the drives – so, I am about to purchase my second external enclosure for the server.  I want to maintain the same organization as I have now, but that leaves a couple of my drives at around 75-80% full, while the third is only at around 30%.   I have five 500GB drives sitting idle from my old media server, so I figure I should put them to use.

I will be purchasing an enclosure that is slightly different from my current one.  This one will support 5 drives and have a built-in port multiplier based on the Silicon Image 3726 chipset.  This will allow me to operate five drives on a single port multiplier capable SATA port.  The card I will be using is based on the Silicon Image 3124 chipset and has two eSATA ports.  This will give me expansion for up to 10 total drives.  Nice.  The case can be seen here and the this is the card.  The card is also PCIe, which won’t impact my bus bandwidth.  The only real downside is the single point of failure at the port multiplier module, but there are drawbacks to most everything.  The pluses outweigh all that to me.

I probably won’t put all five drives in there to begin with as I still intend on going to TB across the entire array.  I just don’t see a point in wasting those 500GB and I can’t think of any other use for them at the moment.  I’ll also have to upgrade my unRAID license to the Pro version as the Plus I currently have will only have room for one more drive.  I may actually get to try out the new cache drive option and use the IDE drive I currently have set aside for my NAS storage for that.  I’ll move that data to one of the 500GB drives.  I’m not sure how useful it will be to me yet though.  I’ll probably try it out just to have something to post about though.

Well, I’ll probably place my order after the long weekend since nothing will get done over it anyway.  My Amazon card payment needs to go through anyway – so, I’ll order Monday.  Hopefully I’ll get it in before next weekend.  Pics and posts will follow, so stay tuned!

Have a happy 4th!