What's wrong with my external disk/enclosure ?

[rjalex]

Dear friends,
I recently had to buy 3x3TB WD Red to replace a failing disk in a 3yr old TS-219P, with two new 3TB disks as the new RAID1 array and a third one I wanted to use as the external USB2 disk.

To my surprise the Coolermaster Xport 351 enclosure only shows 1TB on both the QNAP and also hooked to my iMac. No firmware upgrade to be found.

So question 1 is if you can recommend a reliable external 3.5 enclosure to go with my external 3.5" WD Red 3TB disk

Question 2 is wether I should look for a USB only enclosure or if the eSATA connection could be used to get faster backups when attached to the 219P. FW on the latter is currently 4.2.1

Thanks a lot in advance.

[dolbyman]

I connected several external docks to my 419p+ and they all worked fine

For copy jobs, esata made a difference in speed, but the backups sync jobs, task the little ARM CPU so much, that USB 2.0 vs esata did not do much

[Spider99]

just doing a quick check up online and that enclosure only supports 1.5tb disks

so the best option is to partition the disk into two or probably better 3 partitions - and hopefully the box supports port replication and you will see all two or three partitions - most do - i have some 5 yr+ old esata/usb2 docking ports and they show multiple partitions

as for a replacement enclosure - get a usb3 enclosure - not 3.1 as you find the connectors are different - but usb3 is backward compatible with usb2 on your nas - this will not be a problem as your arm is not powerful enough to worry about bandwidth and when you change the nas/use the enclosure on your mac you will be able to use the full usb3 - 80-100mb/s

esata is a dead technology so dont think its worth the expense to get outdated tech

its your choice though

have fun

[rjalex]

Thanks a lot. Tim great advice and I totally agree. Going for a USB3 box. Just need to be sure that it supports >= 3TB partitions and I've read about some of the enclosures enabling disk spin down after some inactivity and others not. Ideas ?

[Spider99]

my orico see model in sig

Supports 8tb disks

hdd spins down in about 5 seconds after its unplugged or a few mins if no activity from nas

the disks are effectively off - then when needed they are working again in a few seconds - great for backups as you do not have the disks powered on all day for a small amount of work

maybe one of their smaller dual enclosures would do as even my 5 bay one was about the same cost as one 3tb wd red

a double or more enclosure would give you expansion potential for the future

http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=182&t=122129
have a read of the thread as i did some testing etc - the orico( i call it a sisun initially as thats what it was called on amazon) will not show all five drives on your 219 but you do not need that many backup drives

you can also use the enclosure with the 439 in your sig if you still have it as the usb disks can be shared like ..shares on the nas disks so can be seen by your pc/nas directly no need to swap usb cables back and forth

have fun