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Name one external RAID that doesn't have failure-prone ports

D

darkgoob

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 16, 2008
315
305
In 2010 when I got my Mac Pro, I did so because every single external drive enclosure that I could find featured the same problem: failure-prone ports.

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This is just an example. But you can see how ports are made on these drives. The port is soldered onto the circuit board, but every time you plug or unplug it, mechanical stress transfers to the solder points. Eventually they break and it no longer works.

Just google the terms, "external hard drive port failure"... and see the carnage.

Then there are the crappy power supplies that every external RAID system uses. Just google "drobo power supply failure" and "lacie power supply failure" and "g-tech power supply failure"...

Then there is the COST of external enclosures. My Mac Pro (used) ran me $2600 (including a monitor, hard drives, NVIDIA 285 GTX, NVIDIA 120 GT, AppleCare for 3 years, and a 24" LCD that was a $500 monitor).

What are the options for an external Thunderbolt enclosure capable of hosting six SATA drives? (Yes I use all six bays in my Pro.) The stuff I'm seeing is ugly, probably very loud fans, and I have no way to know if the engineering and parts quality is anything like a Mac Pro in terms of the power supply, ports, etc. None of the products I'm seeing have 5.25" optical bays. And all of them are at least $700 WITHOUT the drives.

And if an external bay fails you can't just take it into Apple for AppleCare treatment. You have to deal with "whoever."

I bought my Mac Pro so as to avoid having to rely on external drives for my primary storage (of course I still backup to an external drive and archival BD-R discs). Now what option will Apple give us for an enclosure so we don't have to rely on some Chinese-made garbage with loud fans and ports and power supplies that fail randomly?
 

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Can we interest you in a 5 bay Thunderbolt enclosure? Consider the 5big Thunderbolt. http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?id=10607 And we've had very significant improvements added to our power supply design. Give us a try.


darkgoob said:
In 2010 when I got my Mac Pro, I did so because every single external drive enclosure that I could find featured the same problem: failure-prone ports.

Image

This is just an example. But you can see how ports are made on these drives. The port is soldered onto the circuit board, but every time you plug or unplug it, mechanical stress transfers to the solder points. Eventually they break and it no longer works.

Just google the terms, "external hard drive port failure"... and see the carnage.

Then there are the crappy power supplies that every external RAID system uses. Just google "drobo power supply failure" and "lacie power supply failure" and "g-tech power supply failure"...

Then there is the COST of external enclosures. My Mac Pro (used) ran me $2600 (including a monitor, hard drives, NVIDIA 285 GTX, NVIDIA 120 GT, AppleCare for 3 years, and a 24" LCD that was a $500 monitor).

What are the options for an external Thunderbolt enclosure capable of hosting six SATA drives? (Yes I use all six bays in my Pro.) The stuff I'm seeing is ugly, probably very loud fans, and I have no way to know if the engineering and parts quality is anything like a Mac Pro in terms of the power supply, ports, etc. None of the products I'm seeing have 5.25" optical bays. And all of them are at least $700 WITHOUT the drives.

And if an external bay fails you can't just take it into Apple for AppleCare treatment. You have to deal with "whoever."

I bought my Mac Pro so as to avoid having to rely on external drives for my primary storage (of course I still backup to an external drive and archival BD-R discs). Now what option will Apple give us for an enclosure so we don't have to rely on some Chinese-made garbage with loud fans and ports and power supplies that fail randomly?
Click to expand...
 
lacie has very good t-bolt gear I own a lacie little big disk I opened it and put in 2 ssd's :

flawless in raid0 flawless in raid1 flawless in jbod

I own a lacie t-bolt big2 flawless in raid0 flawless in jbod . i have run these items since dec of 2011. 1 downside it does not come empty.

promise pegasus r6 a 6 drive beast runs like a god perfect in 3x raid0's perfect in jbod allows ssd's perfect in so many ways I can not begin to describe it.

1 downside it does not come empty.

When companies make tech this good and then force drives on me it is annoying.

Alas My powers of wishing both promise and lacie to do the right thing with these godlike next to perfect products has not gotten them to apologize and offer them as empty shells. Now new mac pro buyers will need to buy one of the three I mentioned as they are truly great other then the drives forced upon the public. I must say with the pegasus I order it and 2 spare drives 1 day before the floods. I got the gear with the preflood prices and sold the six drives and the 2 spares.

I then used my own ssds and other drives So my promise pegasus was close to free.
 
Literally the first person I've seen complain about this being a massive issue at all in external drives, talk about looking for hairs to split. I have 10 externals right next to me and none of them have had "port failure". This is like saying all cell phones are bad because they are all prone to broken screens. Don't abuse your equipment and 99.999% chance it isn't going to suffer physical damage.

How do you think they put ports on motherboards and logicboards?
 
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Any enclosure that uses an SFF-8088 miniSAS connector will probably be reliable. IE the type used in enterprise equipment. Of course this means a $500+ raid controller and the external enclosure is likely to be about the size of a computer. I have two external 15 bay enclosures I use that are 3u and I use external cables to them:




The raid controller with the external cables is all the way to the right (with the RJ-45 jack for OOB management).

This setup is a bit extreme but I doubt you will have problems with cables breaking and stuff. Also its pretty much the same performance as having the disks in your machine as the raid controllers goes in your computer. The one I am using is an ARC-1880i (they have ARC-1882i now) which work on Mac/Linux/Windows/Solaris.

Of course the other advantage to this is you can have hundreds of disks hooked up using this method. I have 30x3TB disks.
 
I don't know why the LaCie rep is calling this an enclosure, because it's really not. It's a turn-key 5-disk RAID array with no RAID-5/6 capability (RAID-0, RAID-1 and JBOD only). And they'll void your warranty if you use anything BUT their own drive modules.


Like many others, I'm waiting for actual BARE enclosures that run on TB interfaces. Right now, the closest things we have to that are:

1. TB-based PCIe enclosures with a HBA or RAID card installed, which in turn would connect to a readily available eSATA or SAS enclosure.

2. LaCie's $200 eSATA Hub, which provides 2 SATA-3G ports over a TB connection. This product makes no mention of port multiplier support, though.
 
The LaCie eSATA hub does not have port multiplier support, as far as I have read in various tests. The sonnet tb hub does have it according to their specs.
 
MacVidCards said:
The guys at places like LaCie are salivating.

Anything beyond a mouse & keyboard now requires a 3rd party adapter or cable.
Click to expand...

Wifi 802.11ac and bluetooth 4.0 Not really.

NAS access to a HDD disk would likely be fine on a 11ac network.

----------
CaptainChunk said:
Like many others, I'm waiting for actual BARE enclosures that run on TB interfaces.
Click to expand...

This one is still hasn't made it to market.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5956/qnaps-jtb400-a-byod-4bay-thunderbolt-enclosure

But yes everyone has been trying to drive up the costs of disk enclosures by effectively adding a more expensive RAID controller to the box. Or just aiming at just single (maybe dual) disk. Single HDD is kind of massive overkill.
 
theSeb said:
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echo15thunderboltdock.html

No worries. The only problem is that it's still vapourware, but you can pre-order it. I recall it was announced some time in the middle of last year.

I have the Lacie eSATA hub, but I only use it for enclosures that don't need port multiplier support.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but I was thinking something more along the lines of a multi-bay disk enclosure. That one appears to have an optical drive bay plus a single disk bay. I love all the ports it offers, though. But this seems to be more than anything, targeted to those with very limited I/O connectivity, like MacBook Air owners.
 
CaptainChunk said:
Yeah, but I was thinking something more along the lines of a multi-bay disk enclosure. That one appears to have an optical drive bay plus a single disk bay. I love all the ports it offers, though. But this seems to be more than anything, targeted to those with very limited I/O connectivity, like MacBook Air owners.
Click to expand...

Indeed. I know that's what you're after, but looking at the small number of USB ports and lack of optical drive/hard drive bays in the new Mac Pro, this might be beneficial to more than just MBA owners ;) :D
 
CalDigit has a T3 in the works for a 3-drive solution over thunderbolt, but I'd assume an HDPro style solution over thunderbolt is in the works as well.

Have used HDPro and HDPro2 units on MacPro1,1 through MacPro5,1 and they have been EXTREMELY reliable and fast performing. Latest HDPro2 unit on a 5,1 is always over 600MB/s read and write in 8-bay RAID-5 configuration, attached via PCIe.
 
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