Yes, I too miss the days of Firewire, but now it's all USB all the time. The simplest and most common type of enclosure these days are USB enclosures. Unlike a NAS, these enclosures don't have embedded computers within they simply connect each drive to the host computer. The hardwareĪ multi-bay drive enclosure is simply an external hard drive that holds multiple drives. What most people need is a multi-bay drive enclosure and a multi-drive software solution. In a soft raid setup, a disk that simply fails to mount causes all sorts of problems.Breaking the array because of user error leads to total data loss.You have to format all your disks before you can build the array.You might need power-user levels of storage for all of your digital goodies, but you shouldn't have to be a system administrator to do it. The thing is, even with redundancy, a RAID array is easy to break.
