Suggestions for an 8 Bay or 2x4 Bay Enclosure

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l008com

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 20, 2002
Messages
339
I've had this great 8-bay USB3 MediaSonic enclosure connected to my home server for the past 6.5 years. It's been really good. I bought it without drives for $270 new. I loaded up the drives I had and over the years, I modified it as needed.

Tonight, it started freaking out. Drives come and go depending on how I arrange them. There doesn't seem to be any pattern to the madness. If I rearrange the drives, I might get 5 of them to show up. If I rearrange them again, I might get none. Sadly I think it has shit the bed.

One of the features I liked about it is that it has an internal power supply. No power bricks hanging around cluttering up the place. But that doesn't look like a feature that many 4-bay enclosures have.

So I'm looking for a replacement 8 bay enclosure, or a pair of 4 bay enclosures. But here's the thing, they need to be cheap. No RAID needed, I can do that in software. I just need basic, simple, reliable enclosures. For 3.5" drives if I didn't mention that.

I'd prefer USB3.0 but if it has Type-C connectors, I can adapt.

If you have any suggestions, please post them. Given this chia-craze, this may not be the best time to suddenly need a large enclosure :/ but the tech gods have frowned upon me and now I gotta do what I gotta do.
 
Yeah, I cant get it to show up at all when I type in the website. Damn weird.
 
Well just post the link again and tell me some hints for what the domain is.
 
I had 2 of those, the 4 bay units though. ProBox with eSATA. They worked great for many years. But then I started periodically having issues with discs disappearing. And it's getting hard and harder to find eSATA cards. I finally had a drive completely disappear no matter what slot I put it in. So a couple weeks ago I looked at replacing the ProBox's.

I looked around and really the only modern replacements are the USB-C ones, and they are pricey. So I ended up going ghetto. Bought 2x basic 5 Bay hard drive cages (with 120mm fans on them) and then bought 2 PCI-E SATA controllers and run 40" long SATA cables to each drive. It's not nearly as clean, obviously. But it works great with Windows Storage Spaces and gets much better speeds than I saw with eSATA (each drive gets a cable instead of 4 going through 1).

About $100 total. Looks like shit. Works great.
 
westrock2000 said:
I had 2 of those, the 4 bay units though. ProBox with eSATA. They worked great for many years. But then I started periodically having issues with discs disappearing. And it's getting hard and harder to find eSATA cards. I finally had a drive completely disappear no matter what slot I put it in. So a couple weeks ago I looked at replacing the ProBox's.

I looked around and really the only modern replacements are the USB-C ones, and they are pricey. So I ended up going ghetto. Bought 2x basic 5 Bay hard drive cages (with 120mm fans on them) and then bought 2 PCI-E SATA controllers and run 40" long SATA cables to each drive. It's not nearly as clean, obviously. But it works great with Windows Storage Spaces and gets much better speeds than I saw with eSATA (each drive gets a cable instead of 4 going through 1).

About $100 total. Looks like shit. Works great.
Click to expand...

That's not going to work when your server is a little Mac mini. Plus a "hacked" Custom solution like that is what I used to have before this single USB3 setup. I really don't want to go back.

But in other news, it looks like the enclosure might not be going bad after all. It seems like two of my 3 TB drives were the problem. Even though they were showing up fine, and other random drives were the ones not showing up. The 3 TB were the oldest and once I removed them, everything started running perfectly. And one of the 3 TB drives has 2600 reallocated bad blocks. The other has none but it doesn't always mount, like it has a board problem.
 
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