Chrissy
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Registered: 28th Jan 06
Location: Sunny Glasgow Drives: Astra J
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I'm looking at RAID enclosures and ideally wanted one with 3 bays. Does anyone know if you can use 3 out of the 4 bays in a 4-bay enclosure? Or do they all need to be filled?
>>>> Chris <<<<
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pow
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Registered: 11th Sep 06
Location: Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire
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You can use as many or as little as you like usually!
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Chrissy
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Registered: 28th Jan 06
Location: Sunny Glasgow Drives: Astra J
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Awesome! Thanks
>>>> Chris <<<<
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Rob_Quads
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Registered: 29th Mar 01
Location: southampton
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Just note that if you want to use the extra bay later on you will probably have to rebuilt the whole array!
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pow
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Registered: 11th Sep 06
Location: Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire
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Yeah you can't just tag onto the array once it's built. But you could just slot a disk in there and use it in RAID 0 (ie. no RAID)
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Chrissy
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Registered: 28th Jan 06
Location: Sunny Glasgow Drives: Astra J
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Ah really? I don't envisage myself needing more than 6TB but it would have been handy if I could slot another 3TB drive in there at some point
[Edited on 24-01-2014 by Chrissy]
>>>> Chris <<<<
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John
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Registered: 30th Jun 03
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If its a nas you're looking at, some will let you add extra storage. I know the synolgy ones do if you select the correct options at the beginning.
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Chrissy
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Registered: 28th Jan 06
Location: Sunny Glasgow Drives: Astra J
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It was really just a USB3 enclosure I was looking at. A NAS could be an option however
>>>> Chris <<<<
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John
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Registered: 30th Jun 03
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Is there a reason you need RAID in an enclosure?
Software/crap hardware RAID worries me. I'd rather just have copies on 2 or 3 drives.
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pow
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Registered: 11th Sep 06
Location: Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire
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Software RIAD caught me out once so I'll never let it happen again.
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Chrissy
Premium Member
Registered: 28th Jan 06
Location: Sunny Glasgow Drives: Astra J
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At the moment I have two external 3TB drives. I use automated backup software to keep one as a mirror of the other.
I'm getting ever closer to filling the 3TB and so to make use of the two current drives, I was going to remove them from their enclosures, add another 3TB drive and run them in RAID5 so that my storage capacity would be 6TB.
>>>> Chris <<<<
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Rob_Quads
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Registered: 29th Mar 01
Location: southampton
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Make sure you have a well know brand RAID enclosure if you are going hardware. If the casing fails you might need to find another one of the exact same model.
I know someone who was using motherboard cheap hardware raid - board died and he lost all his stuff as he could not find another item with the same board (and could not find out which controller it used)
At least with software you can move it to another machine if it fails.
On windows I use StableBit drive pool which does mirroring but more importantly it does it using native NTFS so if anything fails you can just move the disk into another other machine and you still have access to the files
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