Storage solution and workflow
Right now I have 6 external hard drives of various brands. Four of them are FW800 equipped and the older two only have FW400.
All these are connected to a Nitro® FW800 8 port hub (I daisy chain the FW400 drives when needed)
All drives mentioned above have one thing in common. They're all either SATA II or III inside of FW enclosures.
I'm getting tired of all the mess with the cables plus all the space it takes on my desk. I am wondering if anyone can share or recommend a neater setup. For about 2 years now I have been searching for some sort of multiple bay external enclosure that would allow me to mount and unmount individual hard drives BUT without having to unmount the other mounted drives. I believe this is called a JBOD setup with a hot swap feature.
About a year ago I bought the DataTale RC-M4QJ and loved it's hot swapping feature with the minimalistic Hard Drive handles but I was disappointed by it's performance as I benchmarked it using int the AJA System Test app and on average, it performed ~25 to 35% slower than my other single HDD enclosures. So back it went for a refund.
I'm hoping someone can share their setup which achieves the same goal here. I will soon be purchasing a new MacBook Pro (as soon as Apple brings them to market) so if you know of a thunderbolt enclosure that can allow what I need to do, please let me know.
My dream enclosure would probably be a thunderbolt one which can handle RAID and JBOD and allow individual mount/unmount without screws or expensive brackets.
Thanks in advance for any feedback.