MacGurus Burly SATA Enclosure Kits
Fully SATAI and SATAII Capable
MacGurus has selected and bundled together the necessary components for
you to assemble your own 2, 4, 5 or 8 drive SATA enclosure for Macs or PCs.
Premium internal SATA
cables
with backplane adapter plates and those great Shielded neoprene External SATA
cables are packaged
along with either our Burly 2 Bay, 4 Bay, 5 Bay or 8 Bay black enclosures.
These are the best components we can get for the task.
Drives:
We highly recommend the Hitachi and
any of the beastly fast Seagate
lineup on our
SATA Hard
Drive page.
These are the best performing, most reliable drives on the market today,
leading in most
every
performance
catagory the 7200
RPM drive
class.
With
a 3 year
warranty and class leading performance the Seagate drives are
our favorites. These kits have everything
you need short of the host
card and the data to store on them.
SATA is the superior drive specification of the day. Reliable, easily
installed and capable of tremendous performance, this is the way to increase
your external storage for a fraction of the cost of most any other solution.
Host Cards:
You will also need a host card solution to go along with your enclosure
choice. There is a wide range of choices in host cards today. These cards
give us a great variety of solutions for great, simple and amazingly fast
external storage.
In our opinion, this is the replacement for Firewire when it come to external
hard drives. No more bridge boards, slow speeds and unreliable support.
External SATA is exactly the same performance as internal SATA!
Cabling:
Most external host cards currently available have eSATA connectors.
Be sure to select either the 1 meter or 2 meter eSATA-eSATA cables when
ordering your Burly. The Burly enclosure has eSATA connectors.
Some of the current host cards may not have enough, or any, external
ports for the number of drives you will be needing. In this case you
will need a method
to
route
your
cables
out
the
back
of
your Mac.
Many
users
currently
just
run
the
cables
in
through
an
empty
PCI
slot
and
attach
to
the internal ports of their SATA host card. That works OK as long
as the cables don’t get pulled on. Internal connectors aren’t
well designed for that type of abuse. Other users modify the metal plate
on the card by
drilling holes or cutting slots to allow the cables to route out through
the same
slot as the card. Be aware that card manufacturers may not accept warranty
responsibility for cards modified this way.
MacGurus recommended installation is to run the PCI
8 Port Adapter
with however many cables running in to the host card. This uses up an additional
PCI slot
but is clean and neat and safe. The eight port adapter is just
a riser card with eight internal SATA connections directly attached to eight
external connectors. Cables are
necessary to run from the adapter to the host
card and
are sold separately.
Be sure to select eSATA - Type A External Cables when purchasing your
Burly if you will use the PCI 8 Port Adapter.
Note: eSATA connections,
originally known as the Type B+ connector, are starting to be seen on host
cards for both PCs and Macs.
This external SATA specification uses a different connector that unfortunately
looks so similar as to be easily mistaken on first glance for the Type A SATA connection. Because of that you will need to pay particular
attention to the cables you select with your Burly. You can select between
1 meter and 2 meter cables. If you use a host card with a TYPE A connector,
be sure to choose the eSATA-TYPEA option on your cable selection.
The Burly enclosure has eSATA connectors.
***One item to note, SATA drives ONLY have
15 pin SATA power connections. These enclosures have 4 pin Molex power
plugs. MacGurus supplies SATA Y Power Adapters for all SATA
Kits on this page.
Be sure to check out our online
SATA External
Installation
Guide.
The Gurus Certify These Kits Rule