Suggestions for hardware

Hi Guys

Great forum and great work done by so many here I've discovered.

My situation is I've got :

• 1 x Seagate Dockstar
• 3 x 1.5 TB HD's

I need some type of enclosure(s) for the HD's to mate them to the Dockstar which has 3 USB ports (not sure if the mini-USB/hotplug port can be used as well as that'd be 4). Recommendations welcome..

Ideally, I'd like to get the most utilized space out of these drives with some type of reliability, and I was pondering if RAID 5 would be a possibility, as that net 3TB use, but I don't know if that's possible with USB attached drives.
(This thread gave me the idea)

Can anyone advise of my options?

Also perhaps some links (didn't see any stickies) for background reading (howto's, serial connection netconsole setup, etc)...

Getting started stuff...

Thx!

Jim



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/21/2013 01:34AM by jimfine.

A few thoughts.

1) I am pretty sure that all the dockstars USB ports are all accessed through a single USB2 channel, so there is really no advantage to hooking each drive to a separate port if you end up getting a multi-drive enclosure.

2) I don't think there is any reason you can't do RAID5 to USB drives, but that doesn't mean you should. I personally don't like RAID5 at all. If that data is worth storing with any sort of redundancy, I don't see why it isn't worth spending a little more and doing mirroring. Moreover, RAID5 has a number of failure modes, and with relatively large drives over USB2, the rebuild times are going to be dangerously long. To be safe you should probably have a hot spare so the rebuild starts ASAP, but then with 3 live drives and a hot spare, you've gained no capacity advantage over mirrored drives.

For the Dockstar top mini USB plug, this adapter works great:
http://dx.com/p/usb-a-female-to-mini-usb-5-pin-female-adapter-26780

-bodhi
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Thanks for the ideas guys.

eas Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> 2) .. (warnings Re: RAID5) ..
> I don't see why it isn't worth
> spending a little more and doing mirroring.

I accept that, and will seek out whichever is less expensive: a 4-bay SATA-USB enclosure, or 4 separate enclosures, and work on a RAID 1 implementation. (I'm thinking about two of these Rosewill Dual Bay Docking Stations.)

Re: RAID 1. Do all the drives need to be:
- same exact capacity?
- identical make/model?

The three HD's I have, have been sitting unopened for a while, and I doubt I could get an exact duplicate if necessary.

Also, any thought about RAID-10 vs RAID-1 on the dockstar?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/26/2013 12:20PM by jimfine.