Step 22: Completing the Job



Screw in Your Remaining Drives.

Align the screw holes in the drive brackets with the sides of the enclosure chassis.
You want your drive pushed as far towards the rear of the enclosure as possible.
Tighten finger-tight only, at first.

RAID Tutorial by magician. Photos by Frank T.

Installing Your Remaining Drives

1. Repeat as needed for additional drives. Make sure you use four screws per side, now that you have both drives installed, and when you have the drives properly positioned inside the enclosure, tighten them down just beyond finger-tight.

2. We recommend resisting the temptation to use just two screws per drive side. Why be lazy? You have plenty of screws. Use them. Remember that Cheetahs are fast drives, and they develop a lot of torque when you spin them up. Over time, loose screws may wiggle free, and using only two screws may result in too many screws coming loose, with your RAID rattling, making scary noises. No need to use Loktite--in fact, we advise against it, as you may need to disassemble this unit at some point, whether to clean it, to adjust a cable or connector, to replace a failed fan unit (it happens occasionally), or to install bigger, faster drives. Properly used and maintained, your Burly Enclosure will last for years.

3. Take pride in what you are doing. It is very simple to roll your own RAID, but not many people have done it. It is a real rite of passage, and you should gain a lot of confiden ce from it. When we built our first array, we realized that there was no reason why others could not do it, as well, and we also realized that a lot of Macintosh professionals and power users would appreciate the opportunity to build their own hardware.

4. Take a good hard look at what you have built, before you proceed to the next step. This RAID you have built uses better components than the off-the-shelf units you can buy from mass storage companies, and the hardware costs less.

5. You now know exactly what went into this array, and this knowledge empowers you. Never again will you purchase storage products from a mass storage vendor without knowing which mechanisms are inside, and you will understand in a fundamental way how the quality of cables and connectors can make the difference between a crappy off-the-shelf unit and a perfect, precisely hand-tuned custom unit. Your new knowledge makes you a better Macintosh user, and you will be able, at this point, to determine whether you have a defective cable, a bad fan, or a bad drive mechanism, saving substantial time and money in the event you need to swap out a component. Likewise, you built this RAID yourself, so you intimately appreciate the quality of the components you have used. It goes without saying that your new RAID will outperform most cheap arrays. In fact, it will outperform most arrays, period, regardless of who builds it. That's why we sell this stuff, and that's why we build our own RAID.

6. The bottom line: it costs less, the quality is much better, and it runs faster.

7. Proceed to the next step to benchtest, burn-in, and then benchmark your new RAID--you are almost done!

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