Looking for fastest USB3 external raid 5 enclosure

L

lupo

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 9, 2005
Messages
108
I have run out of room on my win 7 box (Revo 2 for boot drive, 2x Vertex 2;s in a raid 0, and 2x WD 10K drives in a Raid 0).

I need to look into getting an external USB3 raid 5 enclosure but I want something that has it's own built in controller (I know that can really be a bottleneck.) I am about to head out to the store tomorrow afternoon so any suggestions you can give me would be greatly appreciated.) I also may move this setup from one system to another eventually but being external with it's own controller I think this would not be a problem.

I'll probably populate the enclosure with 4 or 5 WD 10K sata drives; they are currently on sale. However, do you think it would make a difference if I'm using Raid 5 if I went with 2TB 7200 RPM drives? Would I notice any real speed difference going from 10K to 7200K?

Sorry for the short notice but I only have tomorrow off to shop and I figured I would come here and ask the REAL experts. What do you all suggest? I don't need NAS capability since it will be directly attached via USB3.

Thanks in advance.
 
USB3 with a RAID of 10K drives seems like a strange proposition, why not use eSATA ?

I don't know if what you want even exists, but I would think even 5400rpm drives should be enough, and better for power/cooling considerations.
 
I had to disable the 6Gb/s controller so I don't think the external esata will work. The asus rampage III extreme had a knows issue with that controller chip. Everything had to be done in 3Gb/s sata.

The big thing I am looking for is an external enclosure that has it's own raid 5 controller chip in it or else their performance will SUCK.

can anyone recommend something that fits this?
 
I already have a separate NAS system on my network with a raid 5 array totaling 8TB. I need something directly attached to my protools system via USB3 for work storage.
 
I think I found something that will work perfectly from Sans Digital. Thanks to you all for your help!
 
lupo said:
I already have a separate NAS system on my network with a raid 5 array totaling 8TB. I need something directly attached to my protools system via USB3 for work storage.
Click to expand...

You need to seriously reconsider your RAID-5 strategy. At 8TB if you lose a single drive you're looking at around a 66% chance that you'll lose the RAID when attempting to rebuild the RAID-5 enviornment (assuming you are using drives that are 1-in-10^14 bit failure-rated drives.)

- http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/dat...tag=rbxccnbtr1
- http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/ra...all-arrays/483
- http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/wh...tag=rbxccnbzd1

I'll leave these here for you to browse, and highly recommend you go with RAID-6 (or RAID-10) with whatever solution you choose.
 
Tytalus said:
You need to seriously reconsider your RAID-5 strategy. At 8TB if you lose a single drive you're looking at around a 66% chance that you'll lose the RAID when attempting to rebuild the RAID-5 enviornment (assuming you are using drives that are 1-in-10^14 bit failure-rated drives.)

- http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/dat...tag=rbxccnbtr1
- http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/ra...all-arrays/483
- http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/wh...tag=rbxccnbzd1

I'll leave these here for you to browse, and highly recommend you go with RAID-6 (or RAID-10) with whatever solution you choose.
Click to expand...
Wrong. This has been discussed over and over on this forum. If anything, you would get a single block of corruption and would be aware of the fact if it did indeed happen. You would not lose the entire array.
 
I went with the Sans Digital. Looks like a perfect fit! Tanks again for the help!
 
Car anyone recommend a pci-e card that will support 4+ internal sata 3 drives that handles raid 6? That seems like an unusual spec on most of these cards. If I just go with raid 10, and I have 4 2Tb drive, what working space does that leave me with? Edit, it looks like I'm left with a little under 4Tb of storage.
 
Last edited:
Get a SAS controller. All the good hardware RAID cards are SAS now. I recommend Areca again. The 1880i would work nicely for you.
 
Can you Please explain to me the difference between was and sata? The highpoint 2640 x4 i currently have in my nas box says sas, but the guy at newegg said the data 3.0 2tb drives I have attached would work fine. Edit, after looking at the sas drives on new egg they seem much faster, but much smaller on size.

Along with that sas explanation if you can point me to 1.5tb+ drives it would be appreciated

Thanks!
 
Last edited:
SAS controllers support SATA drives (and SAS) and because of this fact, SATA only controllers are slowly going away. They can also support more drives through the use of SAS expanders, but I don't think you need to worry about that for now.
 
But what is sas compared to sata? Are they just scsi drives with a different connector?
 
Yes, the command are SCSI, just with a serial interface instead of parallel. SAS and SATA share the same connector on the drives themselves (except for dual-port drives, but that's just a slight modification).
 
There are some out there, but they are very expensive. Just use SATA drives on a SAS controller like everyone else here does (myself included). Generally, SAS drives are only used when you want 15000rpm drives or dual ports.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top