Roll Your Own SATA Guide Page
Guide and photos by Rick Stephens

 Thank you for checking out MacGurus guide page on building your own SATA drive enclosures. SATA is becoming the drive bus of choice. SATA gives us nearly the speed of SCSI but with the capacity and cost of ATA. These enclosures give up nothing in quality and with wicked fast performance all you might need is a seat belt when you fire them off!

 The enclosure used in these pictures is a Black four bay Burly enclosure. MacGurus is currently offering two, four, five, and eight bay enclosures on our SATA Kits page. The parts and procedures for the smaller 2 Bay enclosure is the same, just less drives and component parts. Every part contained in our kits is available individually from the MacGurus Store.

MacGurus Burly 4 Drive SATA Kit

 The four drive kit pictured above is typical. Offered both with and without drives this kit will come complete with internal cables, mounting brackets and external cables. Plenty of screws are provided in all kits.

 MacGurus Burly SATA Kits that ship with Western Digital 10K Raptor hard drives will also include Ultimate Hard Drive Coolers for the best possible reliability. 10K drives generate a bunch more heat to go along with the ultimate in speed. With the best drives on the planet would you not want to protect them and your precious data? In our opinion, when building a killer RAID enclosure only the best will do. Ultimate Hard Drive Coolers are every bit the best.

 In our testing most every 7200 RPM SATA drive has been kept cool enough without the use of drive coolers, relying on the large 80mm x 80mm cooling fan built into the enclosure. We would agree that in some applications or locations getting rid of heat can be difficult, so the use of drive coolers can be useful with even reasonably cool 7200 RPM drives.

To Roll Your Own SATA Page 2

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