Orico Releases HDD Enclosures That Hold Up to 10 HDDs

[N.Broekhuijsen]

Orico has released some hard drive enclosures, one of which can hold up to ten 3.5" drives.

Orico Releases HDD Enclosures That Hold Up to 10 HDDs : Read more

 

[abbadon_34]

I just use old cases. Why cubes never caught one i'll never know.

 

[Rune Olsen]

This is useless without Raid

 

[Wamphryi]

The only reason to have that many drives would be to run a RAID in my opinion. As it does not support RAID I could find no use for it. I suppose it may be possible to run a software driven RAID at OS level but that is not very inspiring for the price.

 

[mouse24]

Am I the only one that finds the price acceptable? I know I know you could just use some spare parts you have laying around to just make one of these. But assuming you don't have the parts these are quite nice for the price. I doubt you could grab a cheap case/mobo/cpu/psu for under 227/325 that had the same number of drive bays.
Not to mention these would look cool as hell in a "server closet"

 

[Innocent_Bystander-1312890]

you could set it up as win8 storage space or RAID the drives from the system if I'm reading this right.
IB

 

[CrArC]

[quotemsg=10747475,0,1289339]This is useless without Raid[/quotemsg]

I agree in general, but the price would be enormous if you built that functionality into an 8 or 10-bay chassis. Seeing as the drives are independently addressable there's little stopping you from setting up RAID with the individual volumes on the host machine.

In its current configuration it's probably suited to users who want to run lots of individual drives (perhaps for VMs, or recording multiple video streams) and manually organise backups/mirroring of the drives in their host system's software.

The bigger problem for me is network access. I wouldn't want that much potential storage to be local to one machine.

 

[Innocent_Bystander-1312890]

you could set it up as win8 storage space or RAID the drives from the system if I'm reading this right.
IB

 

[drwho1]

This is very interesting .... not to mention USEFUL to me.
I don't need RAID, in fact none of my drives are in RAID.
I have been looking for something like this for a long time.
I will definitely keep my eye on this.

 

[drwho1]

This is very interesting .... not to mention USEFUL to me.
I don't need RAID, in fact none of my drives are in RAID.
I have been looking for something like this for a long time.
I will definitely keep my eye on this.

 

[Ro0ster]

So close to actually being useful. Without RAID, this solution has gimped itself. Sure, it's nice to have all that storage, now you just need to navigate through drives E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, and N. No thanks. I want one logical drive please.

 

[mouse24]

[quotemsg=10748240,0,883342]So close to actually being useful. Without RAID, this solution has gimped itself. Sure, it's nice to have all that storage, now you just need to navigate through drives E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, and N. No thanks. I want one logical drive please.[/quotemsg]

If you have windows 8 (storage spaces) you can do it with that. Though that said you can also just create shortcuts on one drive to various other drives, or just rename the drives and change the icons and boom, there folders with a limited amount of space. (up to however much your hdd can hold.) and again thats where shortcuts come in, ran out of room on that hdd for say large videos? Put them on another drive and make a shortcut to it in that "folder" and boom, problem solved.

 

[Ro0ster]

[quotemsg=10748280,0,431234][quotemsg=10748240,0,883342]So close to actually being useful. Without RAID, this solution has gimped itself. Sure, it's nice to have all that storage, now you just need to navigate through drives E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, and N. No thanks. I want one logical drive please.[/quotemsg]

If you have windows 8 (storage spaces) you can do it with that. Though that said you can also just create shortcuts on one drive to various other drives, or just rename the drives and change the icons and boom, there folders with a limited amount of space. (up to however much your hdd can hold.) and again thats where shortcuts come in, ran out of room on that hdd for say large videos? Put them on another drive and make a shortcut to it in that "folder" and boom, problem solved.[/quotemsg]

I'm not familiar enough with Win8 to comment on it. My next question then would be if Win8 allows the data to be striped with parity for hot-swap drive replacement/rebuild. Or does it just show the drives as one logical array and treat them as clusters?

 

[PrvtChurch]

This would need raid support AND Thunderbolt for me to care.

 

[marthisdil]

Use FreeNAS and ZFS and you don't need hardware raid. ZFS is better anyways.

 

[torbendalum]

I want one !!! that 10 bay one would be perfect for me, i have been planing to build a nice storage server. Set i up as a raid5 with hot spare. Those of you that complaints it does not have raid ??? why wold you want to. You want the raid to be controled by the computer you plug it into. most nas boxes with raid have a tine atom cpu, if you connect it to a computer with a i3/5/7 it will run raid5 much much faster. RoOster you can do precise what you ask with win2012/win8 or normal linux mdadm.

 

[dalethepcman]

Considering the price of a drobo or similar raid enabled enclosure, you could purchase one of these and a mini pc and setup a software based raid.
Toms did a review of software based raid, and the performance is pretty good now days. This would be a good way to spin up a massive amount of storage on a budget.

 

[Rune Olsen]

I find this one quite interesting, Raid and all, cheap too http://www.ssi.com.tw/en/goods.php?act=view&no=33

 

[rmse17]

[quotemsg=10747475,0,1289339]This is useless without Raid[/quotemsg]

Just use ZFS with RAID-Z, no need for a RAID controller, and arguably works better for home use anyway (unless you are hosting a high-demand server with a lot of clients, then you will need some serious RAM for ZFS). ZFS can also use an SSD along with the main storage HDDs to improve performance.

 

[rmse17]

[quotemsg=10749505,0,42921]Use FreeNAS and ZFS and you don't need hardware raid. ZFS is better anyways.[/quotemsg]

Better to use Oracle Solaris 11 Express - still free, and you get newer version of ZFS. The ZFS in FreeNAS lags behind in features.

 

[ipwn3r456]

Multiple HDD enclosures without RAID support? Are you kidding me? Great I have a navigate 10 separate HDDs, and gotta pay attention to make sure you don't put the files to the wrong HDD... And, its weird that the 5 HDD enclosure get the eSATA port, but the 8 and the 10 HDD enclosures don't have that?

 

[palladin9479]

Two problems with this.

#1 No eSATA support in the larger chasis. USB is a horribly protocol for transferring large mounts of bulk data, it's designed to replace the old RS232/LPT ports and doesn't have proper DMA support. This issue doesn't come up when your using flash drives and single external HDDSs but it rears up once you move to large multi-drive storage systems. The latency, overhead and general unreliability of the protocol leads to some serious issues.

#2 No RAID / FIS port switching support. This ties into #1 above, USB is horrible for managing large pools of single disks. Integrated RAID like what mediasonic does would present a single drive to the OS, or if it had eSATA + FIS PM it would present all devices directly and they would be managed the same as internal drives. Windows doesn't support hybrid disks over USB so you can't use their version of software RAID and your actually left with 10 separate volumes to manage.

8-disk external eSATA + USB 3 with native RAID support. Approx $370 USD
http://www.mediasonic.ca/product.php?id=1357290608

8-disk external eSATA + USB 3 without RAID, uses FIS based port multiplier to present the drives. Approx $300 USD
http://www.mediasonic.ca/product.php?id=1357290761

Both are MUCH better choices for cheap high capacity external storage.

 

[palladin9479]

[quotemsg=10750179,0,95424][quotemsg=10749505,0,42921]Use FreeNAS and ZFS and you don't need hardware raid. ZFS is better anyways.[/quotemsg]

Better to use Oracle Solaris 11 Express - still free, and you get newer version of ZFS. The ZFS in FreeNAS lags behind in features.[/quotemsg]

I prefer to stay with Solaris 10. Many of the changes in 11 made the system harder to automate and remotely manager.

 

[tato]

I am trying a similar product from Sharkoon these days (5-bay raid-station) and it works like crap (performance-wise) with horrible speed drops. I will definitely try one of the Orico cases if the prices are reasonable. I have a USB 3.0 hub from them and it works okay.

 

[scooby]

This is exactly what I have been looking for.

But I cannot seem to get a UK supplier that actually stock them.

Been Googling for ages.