by mk01 » Sun Mar 03, 2013 10:13 pm
colleagues, I'm fighting with market and available solutions how to extend capacity of my macs mini. it has no usb3, no pci slot, so only solution i found (beside fw and usb2 which I consider slow or small boxes (low number of drive bays) with FW) is Thunderbolt adapter to ExpressCard and then ExpressCard eSata card to it. But only the Thunderbolt adapter to ExpressCard is going for 299Euro here in Europe, plus the ExpressCard eSata card. Then I can use standard eSata boxes.
Do I oversee any elegant solution or I'm doomed? My idea is to have box of 4drives at minimum, preferably 6 drives. There are LaCie solutions utilizing Thunderbolt directly, but way too expensive and small (1 - 2 disks and meant as a closed boxed external hdd). And the bigger one scalable again without Thunderbolt, providing 80-90Mb/s via FW800.
As I tmp solution I build a box with linux, 6x2TB drives in 3xmirror. I do 100Mb/s via 1Gb ethernet, but still I would prefer directly attached storage due to the latency.
Matus