[SOLVED] What is a good DAS 4 or 5 bay external hard drive enclosure so I can do backups of my M.2 boot drive and storage?

Drakomoon

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Aug 20, 2013
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After 8.5 months of use, my Samaung 970 evo plus 2TB m.2 boot drive crap out on me taking the OS and programs that clone over along with new ones to the data junk pile in the sky. Lucky, I still had the old 2TB hhd that I had my OS and programs on so I'm not staring over again. Thing is I ran out of sata ports (4 ports)on my motherboard and the drives are almost full. 2 drives are 4TB and 1 is 10TB. I'm planning to upgrade them to the 20 to 22TB gold enterprise class sata drives later. I never use Segate drives because they like to die on me and the phase how much your data worth. I need external now with a drive in a 10TB or more so I can do monthly backups of my boot drive and possible expendable in the future.

P.S. If anybody ask about the 3 drives, I keep my video games, movies, pictures and tv shows on them. Blu ray, video games,and tv shows take up a lot space so extra space is need. My computer functions as gaming/entertainment system.

OS: Windows 11 current
PSU: Corsair RM850x 850W New and got it in February
CPU: 12th Gen intel i7-12700f lga 1700 new and got it in February
MB: asus tuf gaming z690-plus wifi d4 new and got it in February
Ram: teamgroup t-force delta ddr4 32gb (2x16gb 3600mhz new and got it in February
CPU Cooler: asus tuf gaming lc 240 argb aio liquid cooler new and got it in February
GPU: sapphire pulse amd radeon rx 6700 xt new and got it in December
Disk drives: wd blue hhd 4tb 3.5 69% full contains steam library, wd black hhd 4tb 3.5 80% full, wd gold hhd 10tb 3.5 62% full but use for movies and tv shows.
Current boot drive: wd blue sn570 nvme ssd 1 tb temp replacement

I didn't see any warning codes before it crap out and Samsung program said it was okay, but I did notice that some of windows programs were acting weird. I reboot it only to get a inaccessible boot device error, tried to repair windows 11 but all attempts failed which cause a loop.

I go in and disconect a current hhd and attach a old hhd to make backups, but they are old and I don't trust them too much. As for the backups, I just copy most importing stuff over to old drives. After 5 to 6 years, hearing a drive about to fail or run out of space, I get a larger size drive and clone it over using wd's cloning program. I do use disk drive diagnostic software both by wd and Samsung check the drives like one a week to make sure the drives are alright.
 
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Ralston18

Titan
Moderator
The first objective is to discover what is specifically going on and causing drive failures.

My suspicion is power problems but much more needs to be known.

Update your post to include full system hardware specs and OS information.

Include PSU: make, model, wattage, age, condition (original to build, new, refurbished, used)?

Disk drives: make, model, capacities (by drive), and how full each drive is?

Do you see any error codes, warnings, etc. via Reliability History and Event Viewer. Or via pop up windows from Windows?

Do you run any disk drive diagnostic software provided by the drive manufacturers?

= = = =

I also believe that your backups should be much more frequent than monthly with that volume of data - that can be addressed later but should be a consideration with respect to potential solutions. What back up software and process do you use?
 

Drakomoon

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Aug 20, 2013
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The first objective is to discover what is specifically going on and causing drive failures.

My suspicion is power problems but much more needs to be known.

Update your post to include full system hardware specs and OS information.

Include PSU: make, model, wattage, age, condition (original to build, new, refurbished, used)?

Disk drives: make, model, capacities (by drive), and how full each drive is?

Do you see any error codes, warnings, etc. via Reliability History and Event Viewer. Or via pop up windows from Windows?

Do you run any disk drive diagnostic software provided by the drive manufacturers?

= = = =

I also believe that your backups should be much more frequent than monthly with that volume of data - that can be addressed later but should be a consideration with respect to potential solutions. What back up software and process do you use?
I did update my post but Samsung m.2 drives are known to fail early, just look at the Amazon 1 star listing for it.
 

Ralston18

Titan
Moderator
Cannot disagree that many products simply no longer have the necessary design and quality to last. However, discussing individual products and end user experiences could make for quite a long discussion with lots of posts.

I will forego that.

My own rule of thumb is to limit any given disk drive to less than 70-80% of capacity. Drives need available space to function efficiently.

HDD's are mechanical and moving parts are always a vulnerability - for any device. And another concern is fragmentation - HDD's should be defragged on some regular basis. [Note- SSD's do not requirement defragging and should not be de-fragmented.]

FYI regarding HDD fragmentation:

https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-fragmentation-defragmentation-2625884

As I understand your post you now have a wd blue sn570 nvme ssd 1 tb as a temporary replacement boot drive. That sn570 replacing a failed Samsung 970 Evo - correct?

Getting bigger drives may be counter productive. Just more to be lost on any given drive if there is a failure of some sort. And that can happen at any time, without any warning. You must maintain regular backups in any case.

And although using older drives for backups is commonly done it is naturally more risky. I only do so with the understanding that the storage is simply storage and not necessarily a backup per se. I have other newer, more reliable drives for that. Still that is no guarantee - multiple backups are needed.

You may be in a position where external storage - perhaps some Network drives (NAS) may serve you better and remove some load from the current gaming/entertainment system and the drives therein.

My suggestion is that you open Disk Management, expand the window to show all drives and partitions. Take a screen shot and post accordingly.

There may be other ideas and suggestions to help manage the storage requirements and hopefully reduce or end the problems cited.

Just my thoughts on the matter.
 
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Drakomoon

Distinguished
Aug 20, 2013
20
0
18,520
Cannot disagree that many products simply no longer have the necessary design and quality to last. However, discussing individual products and end user experiences could make for quite a long discussion with lots of posts.

I will forego that.

My own rule of thumb is to limit any given disk drive to less than 70-80% of capacity. Drives need available space to function efficiently.

HDD's are mechanical and moving parts are always a vulnerability - for any device. And another concern is fragmentation - HDD's should be defragged on some regular basis. [Note- SSD's do not requirement defragging and should not be de-fragmented.]

FYI regarding HDD fragmentation:

https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-fragmentation-defragmentation-2625884

As I understand your post you now have a wd blue sn570 nvme ssd 1 tb as a temporary replacement boot drive. That sn570 replacing a failed Samsung 970 Evo - correct?

Getting bigger drives may be counter productive. Just more to be lost on any given drive if there is a failure of some sort. And that can happen at any time, without any warning. You must maintain regular backups in any case.

And although using older drives for backups is commonly done it is naturally more risky. I only do so with the understanding that the storage is simply storage and not necessarily a backup per se. I have other newer, more reliable drives for that. Still that is no guarantee - multiple backups are needed.

You may be in a position where external storage - perhaps some Network drives (NAS) may serve you better and remove some load from the current gaming/entertainment system and the drives therein.

My suggestion is that you open Disk Management, expand the window to show all drives and partitions. Take a screen shot and post accordingly.

There may be other ideas and suggestions to help manage the storage requirements and hopefully reduce or end the problems cited.

Just my thoughts on the matter.
Yea, it's just a temporary replacement until I get wd m2 black 2 tb drive. Once I move make the backups, I disconnect the drive from the mother board and power so they last longer. I do keep the old drives so if failure does happen, I have the restore option from the data. People should replace the drives when warranty ends so they don't have a nasty surprise when the drive fails outside of warranty.

That was I was looking for a good nas/das with multiple slots for more then 2 hhds so I can have reliable storage for backups and file storage and expanabilty in the future if I want to add more hard drives. I thought about diy my own from looking around the internet and using sas cable to hookup from das to my computer via pice slot to get over the speed of usb3 cable, but I'm not sure if I could use my computer to run raid on the drives.
 
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