4+ Bay HDD Enclosure w/ 3TB HDD Support?

[c.greene914]

Are there any external hard drive enclosures available that house at least 4 drives and have proper support for the relatively new 3TB 3.5" drives?

I am looking to upgrade from my current 2TB drive what is on media center duty. Surprising how quickly that fills up... :\

Thanks

 

[waw74]

Drobo support 3GB drives now, although i'll say, i just got rid of mine. I had a drobo FS, and i think the processor and memory they put in there can't really handle the load of dealing with the raid and managing the file sharing at the same time. it never really got faster than an external USB drive.

I just replaced it with an external raid box from sans digital. connects via USB3 or e-sata. i'm hooking it up to a linux box so i have e-sata, it did play well in testing to my macbook pro over USB2, but the speeds were limited by USB (30 MB/s).

this box will let you pick the raid level, anywhere form JBOD (5 separate disks) to RAID5 with a hot spare, so 3 drives of data, 1 active backup, and if one of those fails the last one jumps in and joins the group.

and this box was less than half of the drobo.
but... the drobo supports miss-matched drives, and is auto-expanding, so if your run out of room, just pop in an additional drive or replace a smaller with a bigger drive, and you're good to go. It's a lot more forgiving than the other raid setups out there.

 

[rossiter]

I was looking into the Drobo FS until I received the following response from Drobo support...

Excerpts from my question:
Please note that this is a pre-sale inquiry. I do not yet own a Drobo FS, but I am considering the purchase of one. I just want to know if the the Drobo FS handles the formatting of drives >2.2TB, specifically Hitachi 3TB drives as I do not have access to a Mac computer that allows for easy access to an internal SATA connection...
...Regarding your questions #’s 3, 4 and 5; have you had power and/or overheating problems with the Drobo FS when fully loaded with 3TB drives?

Drobo support's response:
Drobo FS Firmware v1.1.0 adds support for drives greater then 2TB. 3TB Hitachi hard disk drives should in theory work, we just cant guarantee as 3TB HDD's are a new Drive Technology. I do know that in the past 1 TB drives ran rather hot and were rather power hungry.

 

[blevins321]

I have a Synology 411j that I got a few months ago that is absolutely excellent. Writing speeds are about 35Mbps and reading I've seen as high as 75Mbps. The 411j has a 8TB limit though, but they do have a model that supports up to 12 (4x3GB). I use the proprietary Synology Hybrid Raid (pseudo Raid 5) that helps with being able to use different drive types. I wrote a review on the 411j HERE. The units use the same internal firmware.

Here is a link to the 12TB model from Synology's website, and here is a link to its Amazon page. Hope this helps!