DAS (not NAS)

You tempted fate by saying "Perfick" in post 12. Things always go pear-shaped when somebody says that :lol:.
 
Update: I shall never in my life use the word "perfick" again.

Second HornetTek housing arrived along with an email from the distributer explaining that the bad reviews on Amazon puzzle them greatly. They sell many of these and don't understand people talking of data loss.

So I fired it up with one drive. Works fine. Played for a day, did various power cycles and some heavy data transfer. No worries.

Closed down and added 3 more drives. 2 drives appeared on desktop. Hmm. Rebooted a couple of times and it went up to 3. But never the first one. Closed down, pulled out the 3 drives that were showing and rebooted everything. And I got that sickening message. "This drive is not readable by this operating system - would you like to format it?"

Then I checked Disk Utility. Yeah, my drive is there. But it's not in any known format.

Just run my favourite heavy duty data recovery software. Zilch. All data is gone and drive appears hopelessly corrupt. Nice.

Do not buy HornetTek drive housings - you will lose your data. Srsly, I've never seen what is basically a caddy fail so spectacularly. I'm going to spend the afternoon with my backups and then buy a brand new drive to rectify the damage it's caused. I suspect I'll be discussing a refund....
 
neil_g said:
i still dont understand how you can be so horribly unlucky that 3 separate enclosures now have all had issues.
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Me neither.

I know Apple did some mucking about with USB3 recently and that previously there were issues but I'm coming to the conclusion that these things just don't work.
 
I know you were all worried about me....

update: drive will not function at all in the Hornet. Won't always mount and when it does recovery software marks every single block as damaged.

BUT just put it in an Icy Dock single housing and I have my data back :clap:

That's a pretty clear indication the Hornet is junk.
 
I wonder if the HornetTek would work if hooked up to a PC. Worth a try if you've got one nearby.
 
JonathanRyan said:
There's a PC here but the only drives I have available are HFS.
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Can't you use one of the HFS drives, like this:

  1. Make an image** of the drive (let's call it A) and store the image on another drive (let's call it B).
  2. Format A in the PC.
  3. Copy some data to A.
  4. Put A in the HornetTek and hook it up to the PC.
  5. See if the drive/HornetTek work properly over a couple of days and lots of restarts. If they do, the Mac is causing the problem. if they don't, the fault must lie with the HornetTek.
  6. When finished, restore the image to A.
** Macrium Reflect is good for imaging but I don't know if it works on a Mac.
 
Ozei said:
Can't you use one of the HFS drives, like this:

  1. Make an image** of the drive (let's call it A) and store the image on another drive (let's call it B).
  2. Format A in the PC.
  3. Copy some data to A.
  4. Put A in the HornetTek and hook it up to the PC.
  5. See if the drive/HornetTek work properly over a couple of days and lots of restarts. If they do, the Mac is causing the problem. if they don't, the fault must lie with the HornetTek.
  6. When finished, restore the image to A.
** Macrium Reflect is good for imaging but I don't know if it works on a Mac.
Click to expand...

I guess I could. But

1. That would involve copying large amounts of data about
2. I can't be bothered since it's no help if the box doesn't work on a Mac
3. I really should be editing a couple of weddings rather than fixing other people's faulty kit ;)

Latest news is it looks like the top dock has blown in some way. After a conversation with the supplier it seems Hornettek have recently revealed there's something fishy with the top bay since it doesn't implement SMART. It's entirely possible that Macs don't like this bay. Though it worked for a while and that's a funny definition of "4 bay Mac compatible housing".

neil_g said:
my guess is reports of poor support and proprietary file systems.
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Exactly that. Plus the cost, obvs ;) And the whole "copying all my data off perfectly good drives onto Drobo's magic format drives".
 
Maybe it works ok on a Mac if you leave the top bay empty - that's not exactly an ideal workaround for a new bit of kit though.
 
I went through this recently and concluded that multiple external drives are not such a stupid idea. I bought a couple of Buffalo 3 TB USB 2 drives - they're now £85 each, or cheaper than a bare drive. The USB 3.0 version is £113

USB 2
http://www.ebuyer.com/320355-buffalo-3tb-drivestation-desktop-hard-drive-hd-lb3-0tu2-uk

USB 3
http://www.ebuyer.com/282540-buffalo-3tb-velocity-drivestation-hard-drive-hd-lx3-0tu3-eu

Warranty is 2 years. You can find external drives with a 5-year warranty but they are more than twice as expensive. Logically the best thing to do is to buy the 2-year warranty drives and throw them away when they are 2 years old

You could RAID a pair using Drive Utility or setup a nightly clone using Carbon Copy Cloner which is what I do

Nick Froome
 
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Ozei said:
Maybe it works ok on a Mac if you leave the top bay empty - that's not exactly an ideal workaround for a new bit of kit though.
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Plus, this morning bay 1 worked. Maybe bay 2 will fail tomorrow...

The bottom line is nobody seems to know and HornetTek aren't very forthcoming.

bolide said:
I went through this recently and concluded that multiple external drives are not such a stupid idea.
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I think you're right. If I didn't have drives with data already that's what I would have done from the start.

Seagate 3TB USB 3s are £85 now. Like you say, cheaper than the bare drive. Meantime decent single enclosures are about 25 quid.... :(
 
Just a thought - in case the Mac has more than one port available - my drive enclosure is fine when connected to one port but it doesn't appear in Windows when connected to the other port (Windows gives the 'hardware/device found' beep but the drives don't appear in Disk Management or Win Explorer). Both ports are USB 3.0 (USB23) and are on the motherboard's I/O panel - so they should be identical.
 
This is not going to help AT ALL but...

If only you had 4 spare internal drive bays and some spare onboard SATA ports......... Like.. I'm not sure what sort of hardware would give you that, but it would be real cool if something like that existed..... (sorry to hear of your troubles but really couldn't resist ;) :D)
 
So consensus here is Icy Box for 4-bay DAS? I have a Zotac micro PC running WS2012 and RHEL with several USB drives hanging off it. Would like to consolidate into one external housing without an unnecessarily complex NAS unit adding to the power drain!
 
arad85 said:
This is not going to help AT ALL but...

If only you had 4 spare internal drive bays and some spare onboard SATA ports......... Like.. I'm not sure what sort of hardware would give you that, but it would be real cool if something like that existed..... (sorry to hear of your troubles but really couldn't resist ;) :D)
Click to expand...

You mean like my MacPro - before the EU banned them.....?

mid_gen said:
So consensus here is Icy Box for 4-bay DAS? I have a Zotac micro PC running WS2012 and RHEL with several USB drives hanging off it. Would like to consolidate into one external housing without an unnecessarily complex NAS unit adding to the power drain!
Click to expand...

Might work on a PC. The IcyBox I got was either faulty or doesn't work with a Mac (despite manufacturer's assurances). If you buy one then get it from somewhere you can easily return it to. That's why I love my Amazon Prime.
 
mid_gen said:
So consensus here is Icy Box for 4-bay DAS? I have a Zotac micro PC running WS2012 and RHEL with several USB drives hanging off it. Would like to consolidate into one external housing without an unnecessarily complex NAS unit adding to the power drain!
Click to expand...

Check out startech too. I went that way over icybox.
 
JonathanRyan said:
You mean like my MacPro - before the EU banned them.....?
Click to expand...
Well, obviously not, since you're moving the drives out of the one you already have for some reason.... ;)
 
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