One of the things that I spent some time working on the past couple weeks was organizing my file storage (currently about 3TB of NAS and 3TB of DAS, all RAIDed). I haven’t made 100% progress, but I have made a big dent on shuffling files around – my goal is to have 2 (and only 2) RAIDed copies of important personal files, and then most “media” on a single RAID6 device. Of course, in the course of shuffling, it occurred to me that it might be easier if I had some additional storage…

After evaluating options, the real choices came down to either building a low-power NAS or daisy-chaining a bunch of drives up to my Mac Mini. The latter option is actually cheaper as long as you don’t mind some manual management of mount points (which I don’t), however, finding out about enclosure support for spin-down, noise, and power consumption is pretty much impossible – even though these are pretty much the only distinguishing factors of an enclosure (IMO), no one online, reviewers or users, seems to care all that much.

In the end I decided to hold off a bit to see how the 2TB Barracudas turn out (all other things being equal, I’m leaning towards building a new NAS since I sorta want to play w/ Nexenta and ZFS/RAIDZ – although OpenFiler looks quite sharp). But, since the data/research here is pretty up-to-date (and soon out of date I’m sure), I’m publishing it in case anyone might find it useful: