eSATA HD Enclosure- 2HDs but only 1 port?

[dknguyen]

I was just wondering. THere's an encosure that supports 2 HDs, but only has one external eSATA port? Shouldn't it have two?

 

[blueroomelectronics]

Which model?

 

[dknguyen]

Vantec NexStar MX Dual 3.5in SATA HDD Enclosure w/ RAID, USB2.0 / eSATA at Memory Express Computers

 

[Krumlink]

Vantec NexStar MX Dual 3.5in SATA HDD Enclosure w/ RAID, USB2.0 / eSATA at Memory Express Computers

It supports raid, which means the harddrives inside are set up in some sort of raid config, it says JBOD, raid 0 and raid 1. Hope that answers your question.

Just a bunch of disks

Mirrored

striped

 

[Krumlink]

You would probably want RAID 0 for a single large drive or JBOD for multiple drives

 

[dknguyen]

I just wanted to use it as two independent harddrives. Like JBOD, but if one crashed I don't want to have to go to the extra effort of recovering data from the good drive. I was also concerned about speed when accessing both drives at the same time since there is only one eSATA going to both.

 

[UTMonkey]

Trust me, you do want some RAID configuration.

If you use RAID in a Mirror configuration you shouldn't notice any speed issues.

Hopefully there should be a RAID controller on the device which handles all the clever stuff.

 

[Grossel]

I just wanted to use it as two independent harddrives. Like JBOD, but if one crashed I don't want to have to go to the extra effort of recovering data from the good drive.

You need a special designed file system that support some way to spread files evenly on several independed discs. Neither FAT og NTFS does support this.

Also eSATA is pretty much the same as SATA. That is ONE cable means ONE disc (as the OS see it).

 

[dknguyen]

Trust me, you do want some RAID configuration.

If you use RAID in a Mirror configuration you shouldn't notice any speed issues.

Hopefully there should be a RAID controller on the device which handles all the clever stuff.

I probably left out that I have two internal drives that are already backups. These two external drives are meant to be duplicates of the backups, but not real-time mirrors as I am more likely to botch the files than the HD failing. So I don't need RAID 1 anywhere.

There is a RAID controller on the enclosure though as well as my motherboard. But if even if I was mirroring with RAID 1 I would want it mirroring between an internal and external which would mean the external is always on when my PC is and the purpose of the external backup is that it can be off and disconnected from my PC.

Treating two drives as one is more of a convenience thing since I can always just treat the two HDs separately and spread the files myself. JBOD/RAID0 do this but the problem with these two schemes if one HD goes, the data on both is lost. So if a drive from Backup A failed, I would have to completely rebuild both drives of Backup A using Backup B, rather than just the drive that failed.

Paranoid? YOu bet! It's like meteors...it may be infrequent but it only has to happen once.

 

[UTMonkey]

I am not sure what OS you are using but even if it could handle RAID between internal and external drives (which I doubt) it would be Software RAID only and therefore much, much slower.