DAS (not NAS)

JonathanRyan

JonathanRyan

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So after years of hating them I finally gave in and bought an iMac.

My main concern is that the <cough> "MacPro" currently has 8 TB of internal storage on 3 separate drives of which about 5TB is full. Obviously the iMac drive is fixed (and this one is a 1TB).

So I want a box to stick my current drives in with their data on which I can jack into the iMac and access reasonably quickly. Ideally it would be a box like a NAS but allowing individual drives with a Thunderbolt connection. Be nice if it was £200 or less.

Any ideas?

Best I can find at the moment is a single enclosure with USB3.

For obvious reasons I won't be buying the Drobo.
 
thunderbolt for less than £200? i think youre onto a loser on that one.

USB3 should be plenty quick enough for drive access though, youll not be able to saturate a USB3 with a SATA2 drive. SATA3 is faster than USB3 in theory, but most drives wont saturate the SATA3..

you could get a lacie thunderbolt to eSATA converter but thats most of your budget blown.
 
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neil_g said:
thunderbolt for less than £200? i think youre onto a loser on that one.
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Yeah I can’t figure out why it's so expensive (surely not Apple/Intel's greed....). But that's why I want one box. Looks like I pay a lot for a TB socket so I only want to buy one of them.

But realistically I bet I end up with USB3.
 
I think TB will start to go mainstream now... TB is on a lot of the new Haswell boards. Doesn't help your predicament today though....
 
Thanks.

I always get confused about JBOD. Can I stick a couple of drives in there with data on and access them? Or do I need to reformat them and have the box treat them as a single drive?
 
JBOD = Just a Bunch Of Drives - normally, this means you see all of them individually. (EDIT: I think if you see Combined (JBOD) that means they get treated as a single spanned volume) I had a quick look on Startechs page earlier and the box I have (JBOD) is eSATA/USB2. The USB3 is the RAID one....

How about: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/icy-...m-for-35-sata-hdds-with-usb-30-and-esata-host

Not verified JBOD really does mean JBOD, but they also do RAID enclosures, so you would expect it to be OK.
 
arad85 said:
JBOD = Just a Bunch Of Drives - normally, this means you see all of them individually. (EDIT: I think if you see Combined (JBOD) that means they get treated as a single spanned volume) I had a quick look on Startechs page earlier and the box I have (JBOD) is eSATA/USB2. The USB3 is the RAID one....

How about: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/icy-...m-for-35-sata-hdds-with-usb-30-and-esata-host

Not verified JBOD really does mean JBOD, but they also do RAID enclosures, so you would expect it to be OK.
Click to expand...

Oh that looks perfect - thanks.

USB3 for now and if that's not fast enough then eSata via TB. Perfick ;)
 
Quick review of the IcyBox for anybody who is interested:

Pros: Nicely made, very quiet in operation
Cons: power cable come out of the side rather than the back which spoils the form factor a little, does not work at all no matter what combination of drives I put in, it only reads the top one so it's just a very expensive way to store some spare hard drives

I guess I'd give it 1 out of 10. Handy if you have some papers that are blowing around.
 
neil_g said:
how are you connecting it?
Click to expand...

USB. So it should work. If it was eSata then it would need a port multiplier (and behave exactly like this if I didn't have one).

But really who knows? The instructions are so keen to talk about the RAID capabilities and firewire connections of a completely different model that they are somewhat hard to follow....

Fortunately Amazon will collect it for free and send me a HornetTek one instead.
 
Did you get the right Icy Box.... There are two identical looking systems:

IB-3640SU3 which is JBOD
IB-RD3640SU3 which is the RAID version.

If I gave you a poor link - sorry....
 
I got the right one ;) But the instructions are for both. Mind you, if I'd bought the RAID one then the instructions aren't anything like adequate.

Looking closely at the only online review I could find of the JBOD one, there's only one drive in it. They tested USB3 speed but maybe not > 1 disk.......

Fortunately Amazon are very nice about stuff like this. Ordered yesterday, arrived today, will go back tomorrow and replacement will also be here tomorrow. No wonder they can't afford to pay tax.
 
Also, there's a mysterious blanking plate on the back. Apparently the RAID one has a switch underneath that - so I know they didn't mislabel it.
 
Oh dear.... As Neil said - Icy Box tend to make decent stuff.
 
Yeah I've used Icy stuff before and never had any worries. That's why I paid (slightly) more over the HornetTek one. But it looks like this sin't their finest work.

Actually when I plugged it in, one of my internal SATA disks went missing. I managed to get that working again but this morning the computer won't boot. I suspect that's all a coincidence but it's a bit of an odd one.
 
After a bad start it's been a good news day.

1. My computer finally decided to boot. It was whinging about the BIOS but it turns out you can just ignore that...

2. HornetTek case is actually much nicer than it looks in the pictures. A bot plasticky but it's very small, easy to use and pretty quiet. It lacks the "turn off when the computer does" and auto speed adjusting fan of the IcyBox but then it does, you know, actually work. Seems pretty speedy too.

Oh and my new iMac is here so it was all worth while.
 
Spoke too soon. HornetTek failed after less than an hour's use.

They are sending a new one......
 
JonathanRyan said:
http://www.hornettek.com/hdd-enclosure/3-5-quad-bay-jbod.html
Click to expand...


Ah, I thought it might be the dual bay HT-3210U3.**

The four bay HT3402U3 has had some reports of random disconnections and/or drives being dismounted for no reason - there are a few on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-rev...?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar&showViewpoints=0 and http://www.amazon.com/Hornettek-Ent.../185-8315244-6983108?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1.

** I got this one instead - http://uk.startech.com/HDD/Enclosures/Dual-Bay-SATA-External-Hard-Drive-Enclosure~SAT3520U3SR - works fine (so far) in JBOD mode on a PC. Cheaper at eBuyer.
 
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Ozei said:
Silly question, but have you tried another USB 3.0 cable? These are reliable http://www.ebuyer.com/191993-startech-superspeed-usb3-0-to-b-male-cable-1-8m-usb3sab6.
Click to expand...

Nope ;) I used the one from the box. But the box is displaying symptoms that don't tally with a faulty lead. The HDD lights don't come on and the fan spins down after a while.

Those reports of data loss are worrying.

Srsly, I have no idea why this is so hard. I know I'm going to end up running 4 drives in 4 separate housings with 4 power bricks :( Which really really sucks. I can't undertand why what I'm looking for is rare and difficult.
 
JonathanRyan said:
..... the box is displaying symptoms that don't tally with a faulty lead. The HDD lights don't come on and the fan spins down after a while ......
Click to expand...

Hmm. I wonder if the Smart Auto Power Control (as HornetTek call it) is going bananas with your Mac.
 
Ozei said:
Hmm. I wonder if the Smart Auto Power Control (as HornetTek call it) is going bananas with your Mac.
Click to expand...

Oh hang on......a faulty cable might trip that.

Hmm, I don't have another USB3 cable to hand and there's a new box on the way. I think I'll wait.
 
A faulty cable might explain the Icy Box problem as well - I'd definitely try another cable, if only to rule it out.
 
Ozei said:
A faulty cable might explain the Icy Box problem as well - I'd definitely try another cable, if only to rule it out.
Click to expand...

It was a different cable in the IcyBox. It was the one IcyBox gave me. Now it's the one HornetTek gave me ;)
 
JonathanRyan said:
It was a different cable in the IcyBox. It was the one IcyBox gave me. Now it's the one HornetTek gave me ;)
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Good point - I hadn't thought of that!

It's not the cable then :D, unless of course they're both faulty. :suspect:
 
Ozei said:
Good point - I hadn't thought of that!

It's not the cable then :D, unless of course they're both faulty. :suspect:
Click to expand...

Well, the current theory is that 2 DAS boxes are both faulty so it's 2 of something ;)

When the new box arrives I'll put some junk disks in and run a bunch of file copies to make sure it's reliable before trusting it with real data. But if it wobbles then I guess it will be one housing per drive :(

Out of interest, the HornetTek is a nice design. Fan on the top and vents at the bottom. So in theory it sucks cool air in at the bottom, passes it over the drives and out through the top. Should give decent cooling with minimal fan noise. If the box worked :)
 
It's the common denominator - the Mac ;)
 
neil_g said:
Kinda what I was thinking to be honest.. 2 separate enclosures with issues? Bit odd if you ask me.
Click to expand...

Yeah but all coincidences are odd - that's why we call them coincidences ;)

IcyBox: tested with my main edit machine. Let's pretend it's a high spec PC that happens to like HFS drives :D. Then when it didn't work I tried it with the accounts machine - no joy because of course all the drives I have are HFS :bonk:. Then I tried it with my MacBook running latest flavour of Mountain Lion. No joy. So it MAY work successfully with Win8 (or whatever you boys are up to) but not as advertised with OS X. Either that or it's faulty.

Hornet: worked perfectly on my iMac for nearly an hour (it's on a factory fresh version of ML with latest patches). Then it suddenly died and cannot be resurrected even with disk swaps and overnight cooling. Really, this one is faulty.

Let's see how number 3 goes ;)
 
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