Help with multiple drives....

pcfreak said:

I get it, Thank you everyone....

whs said:

Let me try to answer your questions:
4. In what country are you? I have a hard time believing that enclosures are not available in your country. They are pretty common place.

haha, i am actually in Qatar, if you see it is highly developed here but people are just too dumb to purchase electronics. There is a heavy ongoing for branded and ready to use products. So you see if i try and search for a branded external drive there wouldn't be a problem but not this. You wouldn't believe when i say this, i really had a hard time searching for the parts of my pc (recently home build), i tried the brands but all had dual cores. Here's the shocking part: I had to pay 4600QR for the specs that i have which turns up to USD1250. Considering the specs i don't even think it is more than USD950. As no one goes for the assembled ones the selling is too less and the prices are way high.

Hmm, I guess I would not want to live in your country - apart from the heat. But in my home country (Germany), the prices are a lot higher than here in the US too. But at least you can get everything.

pardon me for butting in but you could go for a third option. Have you thought about a NAS which supports multiple disks. I currently use a Synology DS209, it's a very sexy bit of kit indeed.
Not too cumbersome but not really suitable for transportting, but then neither in this respect are drive enclosures. plus you won't get a 3.5" "raid enabled" drive enclosure that doesn't have an external power supply....

The beauty of the the DS209 is that it has a cut down version of linux installed so you do all manner of top stuff on top of just presenting volumes...I currently use the webserver, camera surveillance station and DNLA streaming capabilities to watch MY "backed up" movies on my xbox 360.

the latest model that supports two drives is the DS211...

my geography isn't all it's cracked up to be but can you order stuff from UAE ?
as on their website http://www.synology.com/ they list one supplier in that area.

hth. if nothing else it's an avenue to investigate.

Now my question is whether to buy a 2.5" or 3.5" as in external or portable.

The 3.5" are usually a bit cheaper for the same capacity than the 2.5" - that is in the US. You have to check in your country.

pcfreak said:

Thanks for the replies,
I actually don't want more disks. I just want 1TB of space for my videos for the time being so NAS would be rather a costly option plus i don't want to go through the hustle of shipping internationally. I would rather be happy if i could find an enclosure here. Sorry i didn't explain my question correctly.
I wanted to ask which of them are more reliable and would go a longer way? 3.5" or 2.5"?
I know 3.5 is cheaper and i too am inclined to it but are they tougher than the 2.5"? One more advantage is that 3.5" have almost double the cache. So that's a plus point.

I think you are right. The 3.5" are probably more robust. And the bigger cache is definitely a big advantage in terms of performance.

Another attachment option is a USB to Sata attachment cable. The one I linked is a bit pricey, but I have seen them for as little as $9.95 - just could not find it right now. It was only to give you an alternate inexpensive idea.