HDD Enclosure

[jozza1998]

Hi guys im looking at getting a HDD Enclosure i have got 6 drives in my pc at the moment but they are blocking airflow so i would like to get or make a HDD Enclosure. if i were to buy one what would you recommend. if i were to build what would i need thanks 

[Bombastinator]

Sata drives?  Each would need either it’s separate sata connection to the motherboard or you’d have to use a different interface which could get complicated and possibly slow things down a lot.  Increasing airflow with more fan or changing the position of the drives within the case sounds like the simplest solution to me.  If you want to break the drives out into their own enclosure there are a lot of different ways to do that.  They tend to at least some degree to both reduce drive speed and increase cost.

[burh4n]

Bombastinator made some good points, and I'd like to add some ideas as well.

Why are you using 6 drives? Is it required to have 6 separate drives? Could you upgrade some of them to a large capacity to spread out the spacing of your drives?

If you need to keep all 6 drives, are you okay to take a performance hit on any of them? If so, you could probably find a USB HDD enclosure (or if you MOBO has eSATA).

Do you need the drives directly connected to your PC? What about buying or building a NAS instead? 

If your case has 5.25" bays that are unused, you could install a HDD adapter/dock there, but that can get funky depending on your case design or desired ascetic.

If you've got the money, you should try to figure out how to get rid of the number of drives you have (if that's an option). I think your best bet would be to see if you could offload the storage to a NAS, since that would reduce the number of components in your system and becomes a semi-redundant storage solution. Second best option (in my opinion) would be to upgrade drive capacities to reduce the number of drives installed. Next would be the 5.25" bay adapters/dock and finally the external enclosure.