4 bay external enclosures

Hi everyone

I'm looking to buy a 4-bay USB 2.0 external enclosure, JBOD, one that can accommodate up to 4T.

The reason for the USB 2.0 is because I have no ext SATA ports and no available internal ports to connect a SATA card.

I have 4 external hdds that are contained in their own enclosurea so I want to removed them from their separate enclosures into the 4-bay. They already have files on them so I don't know if the 4-bay will keep the files or if it will delete them. I think it'll delete them but I'm not sure. This is the 4-bay that I'm going to buy:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...11030&cm_re=4_bay_jbod-_-16-111-030-_-Product

Thanks very much in advance

 

Maybe I phased my question wrong . . . what I want to know is if the enclosure, or any similar enclosure, will basically erase the disks or require them to be formatted/erased/wiped clean.

Since I have a lot of files on the hdds, I don't want them to be erased. If the files will be somehow erased, I'll temporarily move the files onto other drives and then move them back but I'd rather not go through all that if they won't be erased.

 

The only reason I can think of whereby any extant data would be lost is if Spanning or RAID was set on the device, if it's set for JBOD (just a bunch of disks), you should have no problems.

 

Even though the description says: "Access to 4 Hard Drives while using only one cable"?

 

Yes the one cable they're referring to is the USB cable to hook up the external box to your computer.

 

Thanks very much. I didn't know jbod/USB 2.0 could work that way. . . interesting.

Do you know what would happen if one of the hdds failed? The reason I'm asking is because I had a 2-bay enclosure (RAID) and when one of the hdds failed, I couldn't access the files/drive any longer. What would happen to the files if one of the hdds failed in the JBOD array?

 

With JBOD, all drives are fully independant, if one becomes inaccessible for whatever reason, it should not impact on access to data on the others.

 

Will all the hdds have their own drive letters even though there's only one data cable or just one drive letter with the contents of all four hdds showing up when clicking one JBOD drive letter in My Computer?

 

Yes, all drives should have their own drive letters with JBOD.

 

Thanks for explaining so well . . . much appreciated

 

Don't forget to backup any vital data before connecting the drives to any new enclosure, you never know!!

I'd connect them singly, test that all is working AOK before shutting down and connecting the next drive.

 

You can have a 4 bay enclosure where each disk has its own drive letter. Basically its a case with 4 USB bays tied to a hub with one cable out the back. Easy enough, I have 2 BTW from cooldrives.com, one IDE on SATA. I built a big, dare I say huge? Windows server with 4 -2 TB hard drives hooked into a SATA controller, that is JBOD and they are seen as ONE drive. I used blank drives and the system formatted them & in Windows I have one 7.5TB drive.
This is called concatenation or spanning, so I'd look at the description closely before proceeding, that case says spanning.

"Concatenation or spanning of disks is not one of the numbered RAID levels, but it is a popular method for combining multiple physical disk drives into a single virtual disk. It provides no data redundancy. As the name implies, disks are merely concatenated together, end to beginning, so they appear to be a single large disk. It may be referred to as SPAN or BIG"

 

That's good advice . . . thanks very much

One person's feedback says "2TB limit to spanning is a pain... these days with >=1tb drives I just end up using this in JBOD ode." Another person said: "If all you want is a simple enclosure that will give you four individual drives when you plug one cable into the computer, this is the unit for you. It does that brilliantly. Don't expect anything else and you will be very happy with this unit." So I assumed that it has either JBOD or spanning capabilities, but I'm glad you pointed that out.

Thanks very much satrow and foogoo !!