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.

This enclosure is pretty similar to the other SATA enclosures we've looked at so far and has decent features. 4 hot-swappable bays, where you can just slide the bare drive in, without using trays. Port multiplier built-in so you need only connect a single eSATA cable from the array to your host computer. The array supports JBOD, Span/Mirror/Stripe, RAID-5 and RAID-10. Plus it comes with a 2-port eSATA card (PCI-Express). Sadly, I don't think the PCIe card works in a PowerMac G5, but eSATA cards aren't especially expensive, thankfully.

The main caveat here may be the potential failure of the 1TB drives themselves. If you have been watching drive reliability in the past few years, as the drives are getting increasingly denser and storing more data per platter/drive, their failure rate seems to be increasing as well. ZFS has lots of built-in error correction, but if the drive mechanism itself dies a horrible death, might not be much help. Sure, that's what mirroring or RAIDZ is for, but still you often hear of people having upwards of 50% failure rate on a small batch of drives they just bought.

Also the actual drive vendor (Seagate, WD, etc.) is not mentioned in the product description. I know it's picky, but I like to know what's inside, having suffered drive failures before. I pretty much swore off Maxtor after a particularly bad crash turned my drive into a drive-cicle. Too bad Seagate then turned around and bought Maxtor a short while later.