Should I hold off buying a 3TB drive or get a dual enclosure for another 2TB?

[DeanoCeltic]

Like a lot of people, I need more space for my external drives! I've been reading through the threads and it looks like there is no sign of the 2.19TB max issue being solved.

I'm just wondering if anyone has any inside knowledge and knows if Sybass will ever resolve this issue or are we stuck with a 2TB limit. My only other option would be to buy a 2-bay enclosure and house a new 2TB drive there along with my 3rd drive (my first 2 drives are already in a dual enclosure).
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Icy-Box-Ib-3221s...83&sr=1-48

Thanks

[tyrindor]

It's not a bug. 3+ TB is not going to be possible until you buy the A300, or use an external device that supports 3TB. Surpassing 2.19TB is both a hardware and software limitation. In the A210/A200/C200's case, it's a hardware limitation. Syabas is not the only company with devices affected by this, pretty much every "older" device on the market is affected. New devices support far larger hard drives than we will have in the near future.

(10-21-2011 02:09 PM)DeanoCeltic Wrote:  My only other option would be to buy a 2-bay enclosure and house a new 2TB drive there along with my 3rd drive (my first 2 drives are already in a dual enclosure).
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Icy-Box-Ib-3221s...83&sr=1-48

I would suggest making a media server. There a tons of solutions out there. Enclosures tend to be a "temp" fix and end up costing more in the long run. If you built a dedicated server, you could have the ability to expands to 20+ drives with ease and stream that data throughout your entire house to all your devices. You don't think the people around here with 30-50TB (including myself) just have 20 of those hard drive enclosures laying around, do you? If your media server supports 3TB, the popcorn hour will see it as 3TB.

Popular options:
ZFS (not exactly user friendly if you only know Windows)
unRAID (in my opinion the easiest, and it's what I use, but with parity your writes will be about 35MB/s)
FlexRAID (pretty much same thing as unRAID, but free and a smaller community than unRAID)

EDIT: 9AM, repeated myself like 3 times with different wording.. lol

[DeanoCeltic]

Thanks for the post Tyrindor - much appreciated. I'm trying to keep away from a server of any kind to be honest and want to stick with directly attached devices.

[EvanWasHere]

(10-21-2011 02:37 PM)tyrindor Wrote:  It's not a bug. 3+ TB is not going to be possible until you buy the A300, or use an external device that supports 3TB.

So, the A300 will definitly be able to see and fully utilize an external USB 3TB drive?

[tyrindor]

(10-21-2011 04:29 PM)EvanWasHere Wrote:  

(10-21-2011 02:37 PM)tyrindor Wrote:  It's not a bug. 3+ TB is not going to be possible until you buy the A300, or use an external device that supports 3TB.

So, the A300 will definitly be able to see and fully utilize an external USB 3TB drive?

http://www.networkedmediatank.com/images..._Specs.pdf

Scroll down to the very bottom where it shows icon for Sigma Chipset, USB 3.0 etc. It says "3.5" SATA Hard Drive - Up to 3TB" on the 4th icon.

Now by "Up to 3TB" surely means 4+ TB drives too. I'm pretty sure they just put that there because 3TB is the max internal size on the market right now. The barrier is 2.19TB, after a device can see past that it should be able to see far past 3TB. Should have no problem hooking up a 6TB drive when they exist.

[Pain]

(10-21-2011 04:08 PM)DeanoCeltic Wrote:  Thanks for the post Tyrindor - much appreciated. I'm trying to keep away from a server of any kind to be honest and want to stick with directly attached devices.

In case you didn't know, you can use USB hubs to connect any number of standard external USB drives to a A210/A200/C200. I think Werner has 14-16 Drives connected to his.

[BJMoose]

(10-21-2011 04:08 PM)DeanoCeltic Wrote:  Thanks for the post Tyrindor - much appreciated. I'm trying to keep away from a server of any kind to be honest and want to stick with directly attached devices.

Hi, the mediasonic 4bay enclosures work great with PCH and you can get some pretty good deals on ebay and once in awhile newegg has a special on them. Peace, BJMoose

[DeanoCeltic]

(10-22-2011 02:39 AM)BJMoose Wrote:  Hi, the mediasonic 4bay enclosures work great with PCH and you can get some pretty good deals on ebay and once in awhile newegg has a special on them. Peace, BJMoose

Cheers Moose. I found one of those on eBay buy unfortunately the postage almost doubles the price!
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NEW-MEDIASONIC...45faa50752

I did find an option on Amazon. Expensive enough - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dock-MB974SP-B-S...WD815ZHYTQ