[PLUG] USB enclosures

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 3 Apr 2017 11:04:30 -0700
Galen Seitz <galens at seitzassoc.com> dijo:

>On 04/03/17 10:40, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>> I am looking for a 2-bay USB enclosure, at least USB 3.0, with
>> internal software capable of Raid 0. I have been looking at the ICY
>> DOCK MB662U3-2S:

>I would be leery of any USB RAID setup unless I knew with absolute
>certainty that the RAID format/metadata was well documented and
>portable.  In other words, you need to be very certain that it is
>possible to remove the RAID disks from the enclosure and recover the
>data.  If the RAID format is proprietary, you would be in trouble if
>the enclosure dies or the company goes belly up.

I have been shopping all day for USB 3.0 enclosures, and the results
are not encouraging. At this time my plan is to buy a 2-bay enclosure
but use it for now with just the 6TB WD Red Pro drive currently in the
Synology. I only want it to be 2-bay for future expansion.

Once the 6TB drive is out of the Synology the enclosure will be empty. I
will then add a new WD Red Pro 8TB drive to it. The Synology is a DS216j
2-bay NAS enclosure, so some day I will add a second drive to it,
probably another 8TB Red Pro. And for both the USB and the Synology,
once they have a second drive I will use just Raid 0. The USB is backed
up to the Synology nightly with rsync to make it a mirror of the USB,
hence I don't need a Raid that creates redundancy - no need for hot
swapping a failed drive. 

My shopping problem is that there are not a lot of 2-bay USB enclosures
with built in Raid on the market. And every one that I can find has
numerous horrible reviews, almost all of which are due to mechanical
failure, i.e., poor quality control by the manufacturer, not software
problems with the Raid. I realize that there are numerous people here
who administer big server setups and when I say "Raid" they immediately
assume that I want hot swapping redundancy, but I don't see the need
for that.