New HDD Enclosure?

Hey Guys,
My father's external 2TB HDD went out, so we were looking to build our own. This page has all of HDD enclosures that have what we need. We will be installing two WD Caviar Black 1TB HDD's in RAID 1. Also would it be cheaper to build a network rig. Look forward to your answers.

 

I'd also suggest you look at cooldrives.com
Cheaper to build a network rig? You may be able to find an old PC that can handle large drives and have RAID, or buy a RAID card, but for price, I don't know. I like the small RAID boxes, you don't have to worry about an OS & updates. But knowing what I do now I'd buy a home server.

 

Look at the top item on this page. Here is a case to put it in. I have the rest of the components.

 

Essentially, what I'd do is just get a board that supports 4+ sata drives, then instead of XP use opennas for the system.

We have a rather ancient 2U rack mounted iomega nas with 1TB storage (12 drives raid 5 (again small tiny drives)). Similar to this: http://static.iomega.com/img/iom/sections/ix12_300r_open_large.jpg

Works awesome for storage. We currently use it for our ESXi test lab via iScsi.

http://freenas.org/
iScsi setup:
http://www.trainsignaltraining.com/how-to-setup-iscsi-drive-using-freenas/2009-01-19/

I know this may be more than you want, but, I'd go for a cheap system with multiple drives. Also freenas and esxi are both free.

 

Just noticed that some of those hdd enclosures have esata. I'd instead make sure they have dual nics.