Best eSATA JBOD?

redlandmover writes "I already have an HP Media Server (upgraded processor, and memory) that has already been upgraded internally to 3.5TB. I'm sure everyone already has their favorite backup solution (RAID, WHS, a billion external hard drives, etc). My question is: what is the best JBOD (Just a Bunch of Drives), eSATA-connected, external hard drive enclosure? (Preferably, at least 4 drives.)"

I use the Mediasonic ProBox BUT...

[rei_slashdot]

...I can't get the manufacturer to acknowledge or confirm that there is problem when copying between hard drives in the same enclosure. Windows hangs and eventually the Event Logs show "device is not connected" or some sort of issue. Copying between drive and the motherboard's SATA drives works fine but it always hangs/times-out/becomes inaccessible after a random amount of transfer. It's surprisingly well put-together without looking tacky and well-priced but this copying issue between drives inside it is a pain. Transfer between drives inside it seem to work without a hitch using slower USB. http://mediasonicinc.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=150 [mediasonicinc.com] It syncs with your PC's power so if the PC goes off, the box goes to sleep and wakes up when the PC power is restored.

Re:I stopped reading the summary

[deebeed]

I started laughing when he said WHS, BACKUP and data ... storage oh please ;) WHS CORRUPTED DATA FOR A WHOLE YEAR AND MS KNEW ABOUT IT. Do not trust that thing. PLEASE!

The Rosewill RSV-S8

[UserChrisCanter4]

The Rosewill RSV-S8 [rosewill.com] is pretty much exactly what you've described. It's an eSATA enclosure with 8 drive caddies, a power supply, and a fan. It presents the drives to the system as JBOD or one of the various common versions of RAID (implemented in software, I assume). Ignore the comically inflated MSRP; it's $300 on Newegg. It ships with its own eSATA card for compatibility purposes, but I assume it would work with any eSATA adapter that followed the proper specifications. There's also a five drive version available for about $100 less, give or take. I can't speak to the reliability or ease of use, but this sounds like it will fit your requirements.

Re:The best ESATA isn't really ESATA at all.

[LotsOfPhil]

Despite being at the forefront in almost all areas of number theory, Kummer was renowned for being very poor at elementary arithmetic. (A number theorist who was poor at arithmetic!) One story has him standing at the blackboard during a lecture, unable to compute 7 times 9. One mischievous student suggested 61, so Kummer wrote this on the board and started to continue. Another mischievous student shouted out that it was 69 not 61. At this, an exasperated Kummer, said "come on gentlemen, it can not be both". Later, it was rumoured that he told colleagues, he should have known the answer since it couldn't be 61 or 67, because 61 and 67 are primes and it couldn't be 65 because 65 is a multiple of 5, and he should have realized 69 was too large because 7 times 10 was only 70, so the only odd number left in the sixties was 63.

Re:I stopped reading the summary

[Vancorps]

Talk about being old-fashioned. Sorry but you're wrong and all the disk-to-disk backup manufacturers would like to have a word with you.

In all seriousness I'm sure nobody believe you can't have a RAID off-site that is online running snapshots periodically. This protects you from fire, viruses, are equipment failure and at least in my case, allows for business continuity which is pretty important these days.

Of course I do go one further and backup to a 100TB library but thats largely because I don't want to maintain that much online capacity if I don't have to especially since I already had to purchase it once for my main SAN.

Use modern technology, you'll find it much more friendly. Most modern network storage strategies work out great. ZFS does snapshotting making it easy to deploy on small scales. Windows only? Well that's no problem either since you have Volume shadow copy and DFS based on whatever schedule you would like.

I go one further with DFS/VSC and use NetApp snapshotting on the back-end which mirrors the snapshot to another array at another building. Works out great and the only maintenance is the occasional swap out of hard drives when the RAID controllers preemptively fail the drive because they detect abnormalities that will lead to failure.

Re:I stopped reading the summary

[LoRdTAW]

Best method I have of backing up my data is simple. First equip/upgrade a few existing computers with 1TB disks even if you never plan to fill them up. They can be at your parents house, siblings house or work. Copy your really important data like work, projects, photos, music, video (movies, tv shows and p0rn don't count), basically anything that is irreplaceable. Copy that to a 1TB USB disk and copy all the data to the computers you equipped with the backup drives. Now you have your data spread out all over. You can use rsync over the net or via a USB disk to keep things updated between machines. You can even partition the large 1TB disks and make a separate partition for your data so it cannot be tampered with. If a machine fails then from any of the others you can replicate the data.

Sounds like a pain in the ass but I keep copies on my brothers PC and my work PC. Its only about 400GB total so its not even half of the 1TB disk which costs about 75 bucks, small price to pay for peace of mind. I have a big software raid 5 array for personal file serving needs but it is in no way shape or form a backup system. I once had my raid 5 go haywire because of some disk controller problems. After a hardware upgrade I almost lost the array but it came back up and had to rebuild itself. Thankfully it didn't send me into a panic because I had my most important and irreplaceable data backed up.

Re:The Rosewill RSV-S8

[Zerth]

This [geeks.com] is a 5 disk eSATA for $180. Appears to be similar (Silicon Image bits, single cable w/port multiplier, etc)

Well, this is fun

[Master of Transhuman]

OP asks questions about external eSATA enclosures, the entire first page of responses is an argument over whether RAID is backup... /....

Here's an ON-TOPIC RESPONSE! Horrors! Take away my EXCELLENT KARMA for this breach of /. protocol!

I have a client who needed backup for a lot of big video files. We bought an enclosure from PC Pitstop, eight bays each holding 750GB SATA hard drives (1TB wasn't really around last year when we got it) attached to two eSATA cards in the PC controlling the enclosure. We spent a month futzing around trying to get the enclosures to be seen. I forget who made the eSATA controller cards but they sucked - or the enclosure chips sucked.

So we turned to Burley, the guys who make enclosures for Macs mostly, but they work with PCs, too. These guys know their stuff. They told us not to use OEM hard drives in enclosures because some OEM drives you buy are dumped on the market and don't QUITE work with enclosures. They said use retail hard drives only. They also sell very good controller cards. The enclosure we got from them has worked fine for the last year and a half until last week when one of the drives went dead - no surprise. They aren't cheap, but they are well made and support is very good. I had both email and phone conversations with the Burley folks and they provide good support.

We also in the last couple months bought two MicroNet 4-drive eSATA enclosures with 1TB drives from Newegg for use on a Mac Pro. That was a huge mistake, since the drivers simply weren't seen by the Mac at all. Apparently MicroNet didn't bother to test the drivers when Mac OS X 10.5 came out and couldn't be bothered to provide support for that. So we attached the enclosures to a Windows PC and they work OK, although occasionally one or more of the drives will disappear and generate "drive not ready for access" messages in the Windows event logs.

Later, we decided to use those enclosures for iSCSI storage served up to the video lab. So I took one of the video lab PCs that were being replaced by iMacs and installed OpenFiler, the open source storage server run on Linux. The latest Rpath Linux kernel saw the drives and the enclosure no problem. I configured the iSCSI setup and everything seems to be working fine. And interestingly, none of the drives have gone offline like they did with Windows - which means it was Windows fault, not the drives. So now I can install an iSCSI client on the two iMacs - except Apple doesn't HAVE a Mac OS X iSCSI client, once again demonstrating how Apple isn't ready for the enterprise, since Linux has had them for years - fortunately there's a free Mac iSCSI client from another company - and serve up 1.8TB of iSCSI storage to each iMac.

So my advice is: choose your enclosures and the drives in them and the controller cards carefully. Take notice of what Silicon Image chipsets are involved, since SI pretty much dominates the market for those things and they're not the smartest tech company in the world. Make sure you get retail disks for use in the enclosures. Make sure you can return what you bought for refund or replacement because this stuff is not yet "set and forget".

Re:I stopped reading the summary

[TheRaven64]

The grandparent obviously doesn't. ZFS is not in OS X Server 10.5, and was silently dropped from the advertised feature list of 10.6 after the WWDC.

That said, ZFS does go a long way towards working as a backup. With RAID-Z plus snapshots, you are safe from drive failure or accidental deletion. You are not, however, safe from attacks that compromise the OS (and are therefore able to write to the disk at the block level), or from things like theft of the NAS or having a power spike frying the controller and all of the drives. You can alleviate these by using zfs send / zfs receive to pipe incremental updates to a remote machine, however this still doesn't protect you from an attacker compromising both machines.