advice needed ,4 bay hard drive enclosure

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Joined
1 Jan 2017
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1
hi ,
new to this forum i joined to get some advice on the best make/model of 4 bay drive enclosure .I need extra storage for my photos/videos,i was thinking of 4, 8tb drives so that number 1 would have number 2 drive as back up and 3 would have number 4 as back up.
They are not going to be accessed all the time ,just once a month or so to back up any data , so speed is not really an issue.I would like it to have an on/off switch so i would only power it up when needed .But the more i look in to them the more confused i get !,so just after some recomendations of enclosure and drives (from the overclockers site please so not to break any forum rules )

cheers Rob
 
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Joined
10 Sep 2009
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1,467

IMO neither of these are good options as neither does RAID and all file management will need to be done manually by the OP. They are JBOD - just a bunch of disks. Plus the silverstone only supports up to 4TB disks.

OP, I gather you want 16TB of usable space on this enclosure given what you say above.

There are enclosures available that have the option to use RAID. Since you want to use 4x 8TB drives and this data is important, you should look at an Icy Box IB-RD3640SU3. It will do RAID 0, 1, 3, 5, 10. I'd probably put them in RAID 10, though this is the most expensive RAID set up for 4 disks since the usable capacity of the 4 disks is halved when in RAID 10 e.g. your 32TB of disks becomes 16TB in RAID 10. I own a 2 bay Icy Box RAID enclosure with my disks in RAID 1 and it's a nice little unit.

If you used RAID 5, to achieve 16TB of usable space you would only need 4x 6TB disks which would actually result in 18TB of usable space. Fairly significant cost saving there over 4x 8TB in RAID 10 (£1300 vs. £900).

RAID 10 allows 2 of your drives to fail (but not any 2 drives) without losing data. It's still possible to lose data if 2 drives fail (see below). 3 drives failing and you will lose data.

So it's possible to recover data if two drives in a RAID 10 configuration fail, but it's dependent upon which two drives fail. Consider a four-drive RAID 10 setup where drives A and B have data striped across them and are mirrored by drives C and D on the opposite side. This RAID group can recover if any or all drives in a stripe fail, but not if both drives in a particular mirror fail. Therefore, we can recover if drives A and B or drives C and D fail, but not if drives A and C or drives B and D fail.
http://www.computerweekly.com/answer/Recovering-from-a-two-drive-failure-in-a-RAID-10-configuration

RAID 5 allows any 1 of your 4 drives to fail without data loss. But if 2 of your drives fail you will lose data.

My 2p - if it were me, I'd go with 4x 6TB western digital red disks in an enclosure capable of RAID 5.
 
Soldato
Joined
17 Dec 2004
Posts
8,696
I have just bought 1 of these from the rain forrest, you can still get these in black, but harder to get in silver. But I am sure if you email the seller, you can get one in silver. Mine came all the way from the manufacture in china, as I wanted a silver one.

I use mine for backing up and it does what it says on the tin. No fancy raids it sees drives as individual/single drives, plus its usb3 speeds and I get about 80-90mb/s transfer speeds. Much better then my old usb2 hdd enclosures I had, where the speeds were a max of 32mb/s .. Brill thing.

http://www.orico.cc/goods.php?id=4821

I have mine standing ontop of my pc

Image1.jpg
 
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