Has anyone used Burly for storage?

[Keith Alan Morris]

I am looking to solve my 8TB needs without breaking the bank on a CalDigit HD One RAID. I found the Burly 8 Bay Rack Mount PM Enclosure and was wondering if anyone has used a Burly from MacGuru? Seems like a great price, almost too good to be true? Esata is so flakey. I just had a Vantec NextStar 3 1TB Esata drive go bad on me. Esata ports and cables are so loosey goosey. Grrr!

http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/BurlyPortMultiEncl.php

 

[LEON]

Since 2 years , I am using an 8x500 Gigas in an older model of Burly enclosure with bare disks, no tray, linked to a
RocketRaid 2320 card in a Mac (through 8 cables!) and it works very fast with zero trouble.
Today you can find bigger disks and easier link !
Good luck !

 

[Christopher Gosch]

I have been using it as well for several years first as bare disks and later I upgraded it with 2 port multipliers. It is large but very reliable.

 

[Jeremy Newmark]

I am looking to solve my 8TB needs without breaking the bank on a CalDigit HD One RAID. I found the Burly 8 Bay Rack Mount PM Enclosure and was wondering if anyone has used a Burly from MacGuru? Seems like a great price, almost too good to be true? Esata is so flakey. I just had a Vantec NextStar 3 1TB Esata drive go bad on me. Esata ports and cables are so loosey goosey. Grrr!

http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/BurlyPortMultiEncl.php

We used to have a four drive burly box on our Adrenaline before we sold it. We never had a problem with it and cut many many hours of F900 originated HD with it. We are currently using two single bay burly boxes for backing up Red footage in the field and on the road. They've been working flawlessly as well.

At the moment we use Dulce arrays on our two main editing systems, but the bottom line is if your budget is tight, the Burly Boxes work as advertised on both Mac and PC.

 

[Alexis Hanawalt]

I have their cheapest 5 bay option and it's rock solid.

I would suggest, however, looking at the similar options FirmTek offers. Their enclosures are MUCH smaller and prettier for basically the same price... Oh, and quieter fans too.

 

[HD Hildebrand]

As I mentioned in this thread, they are great:

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=18338

I went for 2 x 5 bay instead of 1 x 8 bay - easier to transport, less dedicated to one unit, and about the same price point.

I strongly suggest going trayless as well.

These units have worked very well for me though.

Sorry, but those Vantec NextStar 3's you mentioned are crap (I think they were my first experience with esata as well), these are a world away from that stuff and the MacGuru guys are really helpful/knowledgeable.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The Burly enclosures are pretty cheap. They're generic, widely-available drive enclosures and they use port multipliers. They're in a whole different league than other RAID offerings like the CalDigit HD One or HDPro or other such systems.

Not that the Burly units are bad, they just are what they are. Still reliable and at a good price, just be aware that they're cheaper because they're just a generic box with generic tray components for a JBOD config with the option of port multipliers. You could build the same yourself and save 5% to 10% or so if you track down all the parts from 3 or 4 different vendors.

Other than CalDigit, take a look at Dulce Systems.

 

[sbcooler]

I bought 2 5-Bay Enclosures from MacGuru's and bought drives separately. I bought 7 1 TB Samsung Spinpoint Drives (standard version) and 3 1TB Samsung Spinpoint Drives (Enterprise Level).

I set up a RAID 0 with the Enterprise Level drives and the rest as JBOD's.

I love the design of this unit. This is a bigger unit that some enclosures...which is actually an advantage in my research, because it can dissipate the hot air better and stay cooler, so less of a chance of overheating and losing a drive. The speed is great of these 1TB drives and the RAID works lightening fast.

I find this MacGuru enclosure very sturdy and it feels more solid than some others I checked out at MacWorld. Anyway, the service at MacGuru was incredible...Rick one of the 2 owners I think was great and so was the other guy.

I've called them up 3 or 4 times with little questions and they took the time and effort to help me and were smack on with their answers at least according to all my research.

I highly recommend them. By the way a friend recommended them to me a few years ago and just again a few months ago and that is primarily how I found them.

Hope that helps-

 

[LEON]

I bought 2 5-Bay Enclosures from MacGuru's and bought drives separately. I bought 7 1 TB Samsung Spinpoint Drives (standard version) and 3 1TB Samsung Spinpoint Drives (Enterprise Level).

What is the difference between the Two Samsung models ?

 

[Carl-August Savgård]

I have done some searching on this issue also... here are a couple of options that I have found, havn't tried any of them yet, still running on internal RAID on the workstation. (Offsite backup)

http://www.pc-pitstop.com/
http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sata_port_multipliers/scsat10pm.asp

http://www.enhance-tech.com/
http://www.enhance-tech.com/products/desktop/E10_Series.html

http://www.addonics.com
http://www.addonics.com/products/raid_system/rack_overview.asp

If anyone here tried any of these feel free to write comments about them.