Disk enclosure Part 1
RAID Recovery - Disk enclosure
A disk enclosure refers to a chassis designed to hold disk drives. Drive enclosures also provide power to the drives. They feature a mechanism to communicate to one or more separate computers. External hard disk drives, external DVD-ROM drives, and other devices are built around disk enclosure.
Disk enclosures convert the data sent across their data bus into a format that can be used by the external connection on the computers to which it is connected. This conversion can be as simple as carrying a signal between different types of connectors, or it may be as complex as to require a separate embedded system to retransmit data over connector and signal of a different standard.
Consumer disk enclosures
The common disk enclosure configurations used in consumer market are magnetic hard drives or optical disc drives inside of USB, FireWire, or Serial ATA enclosures. External 3.5” floppy drives are also commonly used.
Enterprise disk enclosures
In enterprise storage, disk enclosures refer to larger physical chassis. This can refer to network attached storage (NAS) and components of a storage area network (SAN). It may also denote a chassis directly attached to one or more servers over an external bus. These enclosures consist of backplane, temperature sensors, enclosure management devices, and redundant power supplies.
Different form factors
Multiple drive enclosures: RAID-enabled enclosures and iSCSI enclosures commonly hold multiple drives.
5.25 inch drive enclosures: These are built for optical 120-mm disks such as DVD-ROM, CD-ROM, CD or DVD burners.
3.5 inch drive enclosures: This form factor was designed for drives for 90-mm (3.5 inch) floppy disks.
