2.5in JBOD external enclosure

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Pyneappel

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May 28, 2016
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Does anyone make an external enclosure to JBOD or RAID a set of exclusively 2.5-inch mechanical or solid state drives? I only want the bays to be 2.5 inch--not put 2.5 inch drives in 3.5 inch bays.

I see IcyDock makes a cage for mounting multiple 2.5 inch drives in a 5.25-inch bay, but does anyone make a complete external enclosure that could be attached to a laptop or desktop with a single USB or Thunderbolt connection?

TIA.
 
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gogo0720

Jul 20, 2018
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Hi,

Yes, you could search DAS or NAS in the shopping website such as newegg.com

But if you need this to backup data, i suggest DAS

and if you need this to backup and also multi-media, i suggest NAS
 
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FireWire2

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Oct 30, 2006
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What is your intention to use, ZFS, or simple JBOD and SATA only or both SAS/SATA. Do you need Thunderbolt 3? These make lots of differences in cost.
 
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Pyneappel

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May 28, 2016
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Well nothing is set in stone. This is just prosumer, not enterprise stuff. I currently have a very large PC case with a lot of 3.5" internal drives. I run Stablebit DrivePool to combine these as JBOD disks into a single drive letter in WIndows 7. I physically relocate to different cities sometimes and this is heavy and difficult to move. Prior to that I had used a MediaSonic JBOD external enclosure over USB 3.x connected to a laptop. That latter solution was unreliable; the unit would go offline sporadically and need power cycled and/or drives would disconnect under load. Personally I am wary of proprietary RAID systems as they seem a PITA to rebuild when they fail, if they successfully rebuild at all.

I don't think I need SAS (?). I'm open to whatever thunderbolt, eSATA, or USB connection is the fastest and most stable under load. I'm open to a separate Linux/ZFS solution for file sharing, but I really like knowing that with DrivePool if something goes haywire I can still read the underlying filesystem of a drive natively with the OS and don't need specialized recovery software and a PhD in the art of data recovery.

So, I was wondering what alternatives exist now, 5+ years later. There seem to be a plethora of external RAID/JBOD devices for 3.5", but not 2.5" FF. Or, if they exist, it has been hard for me to find 2.5"-only ones as all the 3.5" enclosures also support 2.5". I understand there are a myriad of performance issues RAIDing SSDs, and that I am contradicting myself talking about the cost of the enclosure when I'm going to fill it with costlier smaller FF drives, but I can't see the engineering of a 2.5" enclosure costing 3x-4x the price of what I can get a similar 3.5" enclosure.for; or costing as much as the computer it will connect to.

Cheers
 
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FireWire2

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"DrivePool if something goes haywire I can still read the underlying filesystem of a drive natively with the OS and don't need specialized recovery software and a PhD in the art of data recovery."
That is nice to know, thank you.
I don't think you need the thunderbolt, too expensive for your need particular in DrivePool, or ZFS.

Maybe 16x drives connect to 4x eSATA (6Gb), each handles 4 drives of 2.5" is what you need, or 8 bay JBOD tower using PM SATA III (6G) per 2x eSATA 6g host DYI
 
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