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I wish I'd known about these years ago. I'm looking at this thing....
https://sabrent.com/collections/docking-station/products/ds-sc4b Apparently I can hot swap a variety of drives in and out. My NAS with a RAID crashed a while back and I've been looking for something simpler. Anyone have any experience with these things? I'm assuming that unlike the NAS, it's a simple unit so should be more reliable.It might be slower than an ethernet connection but less fiddly. And it would certainly be tidier than all the USBs I have lying about 🙁 .
That's the idea. The problem with a NAS is that the controller is the weak point, and this is what happened to mine (Mediasonic crap). I've got an internal SATA card with 6 connections and am fiddling with a way to support four damn drives beside the computer and connect them to the card so that the software can suck everything off the drives. Because the drives are good, I was going to just use some single drive caddies and use them as great big USB sticks. Then I thought,
"What if someone makes an enclosure for multiple drives?"
Turns out several companies do and Sabrent seems to a leader in them with enclosures going up to 10 drives. That's a LOT of...er...not porn. I've just asked them if the drives have to be the same size. It would be great to be able to hot swap all my drives to rationalize my crap. I started this to get all my old content and Poser stuff organized as someone wants it.If the drives are only for storage and not regular access you could just keep them in a cupboard. My PC has 8 USB ports so I just plug in the SDDs when I need them. Granted, it does get very messy at times and I usually forget what's on each of them.
Nice find @ethiopia. I don't like hard drives lying around on my desk and the forest of cables needed to connect them either.
As you point out, a NAS is nice but :
1- it's expensive
2- unless you only use standard RAID 1 and not the proprietary systems offered by the various brands, in the event of controller failure it's bye bye to the data (in reality it's recoverable, but a real pain to do).The system you've found is 60% cheaper than a Synology 4-bay NAS, no operating system, no rights to manage, just a nice 4-disk rack to put on your desk to keep things tidy and have your data available when you need it. I love it!
I don't see what's stopping you from having disks of different sizes. In my opinion, the RAID they talk about in the presentation must be a software RAID managed by Windows, but I wouldn't dare go down that road too much with USB disks (unless they've implemented their own RAID but, once again, be careful not to end up in the situation you've just experienced again).
I don't know if you're going to get one, but if you are, I look forward to hearing from you.
Isn't this functionally speaking just a fancy external HDD? I have been using a very basic one or another since early days of SATA and that is exactly what it is. I even have one connected to a NAS.
If the PC it's connected to is always on then in practice you don't really need a NAS but since my mothership PC has very high network and disk activities I still prefer using a cheap NAS. While Synology doesn't fall into the cheap category the most basic models from Qnap and new NAS players from China are not that much more expensive than this particular enclosure.
What I do want is a NAS using file systems that can be read natively by Windows which I am sure many people want but for some reason nobody sells one.
It is a neat high quality item, but boy, do you pay for it.
It doesn't really do anything a docking bay would do for nearly a tenth of the price.
Admittedly it is 4 bay as opposed to 2 or one, but you still have to have the internal drives to insert.It is one hell of a sight prettier & neater though.
A bit like looking at a Ferrari & then a Lada.
Yeah, they both do the same thing, right?
🙂
I don't consider the price high. It's 328 bucks (Canadian) on Amazon and I can have it by next week. Compared to individual containers from Vantec (I have several of them) it's reasonable, and soooo much easier.
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