This is what I have come up with for the guts of the storage box. After some more thinking about it and looking around on the internet. I think I have a plan sort of.
I am going to use one type of connecter for the drives SATA. So far it looks like it will be the easiest and fastest way to go. And it will make cable management a lot nicer when it is done.
I am going to use two types of connections to the computer eSATA and USB. One to I don’t know how many connections using eSATA for the physically mounted drives. Depends on how I set it all up. I am hoping for no more than five. Two to four separate hard drive to computer connections using USB for the removable drives. I am going to use 2.5 inch laptop hard drives for the removable drives. So they can draw power from any computer that they are connected to. I was thinking about throwing in a harness for a 1.8 inch hard drive enclosure as well. Maybe even an adapter to connect to 1.8 inch hard drives.
As for the DVD burners the SATA port multiplier I want to use the 5X1 eSATA one needs a controller card in the computer to register optical drives. They do manufacture another port multiplier that does support optical drives with out the controller card. It is a 2X1 eSATA / USB 2.0 Hardware Port Multiplier but it only supports one optical drive.
The parts that I am looking at so far are as follows
One Addonics 5X1 eSATA Hardware Port Multiplier for the drives connected to my main workstation and laptop. For right now one then another one down the road. Two Addonics 2X1 eSATA / USB 2.0 Hardware Port Multiplier’s for the DVD burners. Since they only support one optical drive. Since they are hot swap capable use the port’s left over for back up hard drives. A couple of Addonics USB 2.0 to eSATA Adapter’s. Down the road when I get the box built so that if I do need to I can connect the eSATA ports to any computer.
For the removable drives I am going to get some nice looking USB 2.5 inch hard drive enclosures and build a dock for them in the top of it.
As I am writing this I also thought of making an iPod dock in it as well. If I could get it so that it or another type of MP3 player could read the drives with out a computer. That would be nice. I was thinking about it and I want to build this mostly to store my music, movies, pictures and the files that I need to fix other peoples computers.