Unit to store 20TB from 5 hard drives JBOD

[pjny]

Hi,

I need a usb 3 box that will take 4-5 5 TB internal SATA drives so I can have access to all my files. I have about 25 drives with 3 drives storing photos for each year.

I don't want anything fancy like NAS which requires special NAS drives.

I looked at drobo but there are too many problems with it if things go wrong.

I just want to slide in 4-5 drives and the box can show all the files as one drive.

Toshiba 5tb is now $150 and I would just need 4-5 of these to search through my archive.

Thanks.

 

[matreya]

I've used these and they're very reliable

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/M3QX2KIT0GB/

 

[ZapNZs]

I've been eyeing this since it's now $160 with the discount, and it seems quite well liked...

 

[Chancha]

Do you mean to concatenate/span? JBOD alone only means showing the drives separately as is.

With a 4+ drive bay enclosure the more popular choice is to RAID-5 it, so you get both the benefits of a single logical volume for practicalness, and distributed parity for safety.

Since you are fine with just USB3 speed, there are literally dozens of cheaper choices out there, no need to tread into Drobo tier territory.

 

[hallux]

I have this one with four 5TB drives in it.

Amazon.com: Mediasonic ProBox HF2-SU3S2 4 Bay 3.5” SATA HDD Enclosure – USB 3.0 & eSATA Support SATA 3 6.0Gbps HDD transfer speed: Electronics

I'd say it's 95% reliable. It's plugged into my Mini to act as a mass storage location. The device will randomly shut down, but it doesn't impact my use as I'm not accessing it at the time it shuts off and there are no issues with the data on the drives as a result. This may also be a result of self-tests on my UPS as I have noticed that I have had instances of the box shutting down when the UPS kicked in due to a power outage, but not other times.