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Win7 with multiple HDD's sluggish & external enclosures

D

Dreven

n00b
Joined
Oct 30, 2006
Messages
32
I've tried running for awhile with x4 HDD's and x1 SDD in my system:
x1 128GB C300 Crucial SSD
x2 1T WD Blacks
x2 2T WD Blacks
(mobo: Asus Sabertooth P67 rev1)

With all those drives in I couldn't take the sluggish feel of the system. Mostly I'd notice it when I opened a drive. It felt like Win7 was doing something like waking all drives in the entire system when accessing a drive - like sometimes a full minute or more of a wait before the drive opened and was usable. I don't really notice it with two of the 4 HDD removed.

I've been thinking about getting an external enclosure - just started trying to read up on them. As far as I know - my mobo is suppose to support eSata port multiplication. Anyone have any tips on exactly what to look for in an external enclosure? Mostly I just want something next to the system than I can turn on and off easily via a power switch to have available only when needed.

I think I'm leaning toward this ProBox:
http://www.amazon.com/ProBox-Drive-...1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1331563869&sr=1-1

Also looking at:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817198047

It doesn't look like the Icy Dock has a front on/off switch and it's $65 more than the IcyBox. But it does have a built in PSU instead of needing a power brick. The ProBox having a side connecting power cable seems very odd. Any thoughts on what I should be looking for here?

Also - I've seen some people say that WD Green drives are good enough to stream 1080p video while others have said it's not fast enough. If I was to stick x4 WD 2TB green drives in a box, would the speed in RAID make up for the slowness of the green drives? I really don't care about RAID otherwise, if I can stream 1080p well, that's all the HDD speed I need. Those 'green' 2TB drives are so much cheaper than the WD drives it's hard to pass up.

Thanks
 
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I don't have any experience with the two you listed, but I used to use and older model of this : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111177
before I built a server to house all my drives, it has a on/off switch and provided access to each drive individually. Reading/Writing was fast to each drive, the only time it was slow was writing from one drive to another inside the enclosure, was non-issue for me.

I guess the things to look for depends on what you need. Since you want a on/off switch, look for that. If you need RAID, look for that.

WD Greens read speeds are plenty for 1080p, been using mine with no issue. WD Greens are not good in hardware RAID configurations from what I hear because they get dropped from the array when they park their heads, don't know if that's still the case.
 
2x 2tb wd20ears in RAID1 and i'm streaming 1080p to media player classic just fine right now as I type this over my network.
 
Have you looked into the power settings for the mechanical HDs?

Go into the Control Panel, look for Power Options, and make sure you're not into somekinda power saving mode.
 
I have the icy dock one. 6 of them, actually. However, being unsure about the compatibily of my eSATA ports, I took the version with a controller card included (SiI based). It turns out my eSATA ports don't see more than one drive. My internal JMicron (or Marvell ? Can't remember) 6GBps ports do kind of work, up to 7 drives across two enclosures => not ideal.

No problem with the included card, however, or the USB2 connection. Performance is the same as without the enclosure, basically (in eSATA, of course). There is an on/off switch at the back, along with a speed controller for the fan. Cooling is not great, but alright for green drives.

I bought 6 because they were very cheap during the winter sale.
 
There may be something wrong with your system.
I am running an original install of win 7 from August of 2009. I just cloned my os to an SSD 2 days ago and it still runs great. I had to remove 1 drive due to lack of SATA ports on the mobo.

I also have 6 spinning drives in the system, a 1tb black, 3 samsung 2tb, and 2 2tb wd greens.
All the drives open up instantly.

I used to have 4 externals attached to the machine as well, but decided to only attach them when needed since boot up would take a long time since it would spin up each drive 1 at a time during POST.
 
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