External (raid) enclosures - best manufacturers?

L

Lebowsky

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 21, 2013
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I am looking at building a few TB of external storage. I might do it in RAID1 in case one the drive has issues. Not decided on that yet. And yes, I know that RAID != backup ;). The goal is to have external "cold" storage, so not often plugged in to store data every once in a while.

I've seen many enclosures around, many of absolutely unknown brands, so I have no idea what is considered to be reliable and what isn't.

OS is Windows 7 64bit, I have both USB3 and Thunderbolt. Would be great to have both on the enclosure. But all the ones I saw with thunderbolt were said to be "MAC only" :eek:

Thanks`!
 
If space and energy cost is not an issue, consider building your own storage. You really do not need that much HP to build a home NAS. You can probably pick up an older sas raid controller for a decent price on ebay. Or better yet, you can probably find an older server that has come off from lease for less than 500 bucks and build a raid 10 array and load Windows 2012 or 2008 with the storage server roles on it and LACP the NICs.
 
drescherjm said:
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I saw what you wrote :p

tmillszero1 said:
If space and energy cost is not an issue, consider building your own storage. You really do not need that much HP to build a home NAS. You can probably pick up an older sas raid controller for a decent price on ebay. Or better yet, you can probably find an older server that has come off from lease for less than 500 bucks and build a raid 10 array and load Windows 2012 or 2008 with the storage server roles on it and LACP the NICs.
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This is really not the goal. I only want to save stuff, and I'll probably plug it twice a year to access the data. I see the following variant:

- a single external "already-made" 3TB WD or Seagate drive. However I don't know what kind of drives they put in those.

- an external enclosure and get a separate drive, so that I know what I put inside it. Thinking about it, if I only plug it twice a year, the risk of a drive failure would probably be no-existent, so there wouldn't be any point in doing RAID 1 I believe. Locally available manufacturer are:

Digitus
ICY BOX
RAIDON
Raidsonic
Sharkoon
Silverstone
Vantec

Any thoughts on those?

thanks
 
Thinking about it, if I only plug it twice a year, the risk of a drive failure would probably be no-existent
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I say no. There is always a chance of failure. Drives do not always die because of wearing out.
 
I got a Silverstone TS07. Hope it ain't cr**. It was the smallest one available for 3.5".
 
I have had an ARECA 1880 (external enclosure), and been very happy with it. Be careful about the physical drives that you put into any enclosure. Most of the vendors have supported disc model numbers.

So - what did you end up buying? And are you happy with the purchase?
 
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