Orico Releases HDD Enclosures That Hold Up to 10 HDDs
A Chinese company, Orico, has released three hard drive enclosures that can hold a number of hard drives, ranging from five to ten. The first, the 1088USJ3, holds up to ten 3.5" hard drives, the 8988USJ3 holds eight drives, and the 5988SUSJ3 can hold up to five hard drives.
All the units are powered by standard ATX power supplies, and they are built using matte black SECC steel enclosures.
The drives all have a SATA3 interface for 6 Gb/s of bandwidth, and all the units feature USB 3.0 connectivity except the 5988SUSJ3, which has USB 3.0 connectivity and eSATA connectivity. Sadly, the units do not have any form of RAID support, so each hard drive will be accessible as a single device. How many partitions the user creates on each drive can result in an insane number of accessible volumes through a single USB 3.0 connection.
The units will cost 1399¥ ($227), 1999¥ ($325), and 2399¥ ($390) for the 5988SUSJ3, 8988USJ3, and 1088USJ3, respectively, with no word on availability just yet.
Not to mention these would look cool as hell in a "server closet"
IB
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.
IB
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Better to use Oracle Solaris 11 Express - still free, and you get newer version of ZFS. The ZFS in FreeNAS lags behind in features.