A recent post on the ZFS mailing list mentions the Fantom SR44000E 4TB eSATA External Hard Drive w/2-port PCI-Express Card, being sold at NewEgg.com for $999.99. The odd thing is that the drive is nowhere to be seen on Fantom Drive's own web site. Bad sign or just an older product still being sold? As of this writing, no user comments existed for the item, so it's hard to tell if it's a good deal or not. You might read the user comments on other Fantom products, to help you decide.
Simon Breden blogs about his specs for his Solaris 10 x86 server for ZFS. After looking at drive enclosures, I was curious what his system would cost today. All prices are from NewEgg.com as of April 3, 2008.
As I poke around for more drive enclosures, I found a link to this pretty nice looking one from IcyDock.
The horribly named IcyDock MB561S-4S is a 4-bay SATA enclosure, with eSATA external interface. There are 4 eSATA ports on the chassis, which I'm assuming means there'd have to be 4 SATA cables going from the drive to the host computer. Not the cleanest configuration, in terms of cabling, by far. The drive doesn't support RAID by itself, but if we're using ZFS we don't need a built-in RAID controller anyway.
It's a pretty nice screwless hot-swappable design. This is much better than the qBOX-F Firewire enclosure I looked at earlier.
IcyDock 4-drive SATA enclosure
The IcyDock MB561S-4S seems to be in the $200-250 range at Newegg and other resellers, but it's only $149 at Buy.com (after a rebate). During April 2008, there's a $199 mail-in rebate on this enclosure. See the reviews from NewEgg.com.
My only additional cost would be to add a 4-port eSATA card to PowerMac G5, for around $140, plus some cables. But that's a cost I'd have to factor in for most all of these eSATA enclosures (even a 2-port SATA card is around $100 or so).
After my initial test with ZFS on Mac I had put away the drive I was using as my testbed. I unmounted and unplugged it to do more testing later.
So later on, I decided to remount the ZFS drive and try other things with it. I was still using the IDE/SATA-USB bridge, like I mentioned in my earlier post. As soon as I plugged in the USB cable into the Mac -- *BOOM* -- immediate Grey Screen of Death and the machine was instantly locked up and required a hard reboot. Oops.
Kind of puts a damper on trying a Mac-only solution. I'll try again later when I have time. Maybe it was a fluke?
From Sept 2007, here's Robert Scoble's interview with the creators of ZFS.
Cyberguys.com has always been one my of favorite computer parts and accessories vendors. They have good prices, a pretty wide selection and I've never had any problems with ordering from them. They're not quite as big as say NewEgg.com, but Cyberguys tends to have slightly different and interesting products for sale.
One of the enclosures available at Cyberguys is a nameless 4-bay eSATA enclosure (item# 163 0333). It's only $279 and comes with a RAID controller card (not as much use to me, if I'm going to use it on a Mac, but might be handy if I ended up using a Solaris x86 setup).
(If you're interested in a USB version of the same enclosure, it's only $199.00)
