I have an S352BU313R that has been in service and trouble free for several years. Since I bought it, drive prices have come down.
I currently have two 4TB drives in a raid 1 array. How large can the drives be in this device? I’m thinking of either adding a new array or just upgrading this one.
Thanks
Hello @edgreenberg,
Thank you for taking the time to ask your question here on our StarTech.com community page.
I am glad to hear that the S352BU313R has served you well!
This enclosure has been discontinued for some time, but we still have the technical specifications posted for it when searched from support section of our site.
The maximum drive capacity entry in the performance section does not actually have a maximum capacity, so we only have an official testing result: 10TB. Though, I have seen some unofficial reports indicating success with much larger drives. I would certainly expect any pair of standard SATA III drives to work fine in the S352BU313R.
Just be sure that any valuable data is backed up before making changes to the drives in the S352BU313R.
I hope that helps! Let us know if you have any other questions.
Sincerely,
Hi David, thanks for the info. I have a 4 TB drive that can hold the existing contents of my array while I change out the drives. On the other hand, the cost of a new equivalent array box is probably negligible compared to the cost of larger drives. Can you recommend a StarTech product that is the equivalent of what I have.
Hey @edgreenberg,
I have taken a moment to review our enclosures because, I unfortunately do not seem to get asked about RAID enclosures to often anymore.
We do not have too many multi-drive enclosures to choose from at the moment on the External Drive Enclosures section of our site.
The closest option will be Product ID: S352BU33RER. However, is not in stock in our warehouse right now, but you can try the “Buy from Reseller or Distributor” button to check for stock with some of our major online partners.
If it is no longer in stock with our resellers, hopefully those links can help you to begin your search for a product that will work best for you.
Let me know if you have questions about any of these enclosure.
Sincerely,
Well, I just read something that’s pretty frightening:
“Drives that have been configured as part of a RAID with S352BU33RER are unable to be accessed outside of the RAID controller unless they are formatted and data is erased first. To ensure your data is not lost in the event of hardware failure, we recommend regular back ups of the data stored on RAID drives. Lukas, Support”
I imagine that this is true of the S352BU313R as well. And now that device is discontinued. This means that my four terabytes of backups is at risk.
Backing up multiple terabytes is difficult. That’s why we have raid. In my case, the multiple terabyte array IS my backup.
So here’s my question… If I configure either the device I have or the device we’ve been discussing as a JBOD, and I mounted on my system, will I see one logical unit or two? If it’s two, I can take those two and make a software defined raid in my Linux box, and in the event that box goes down, I can take those two drives anywhere.
Please let me know about the logical units. I have two 14 TB drives coming from Amazon this week, so I’m particularly concerned.
Thanks,
Ed
Hello @edgreenberg,
I am sorry about that scare! Yes, the trouble reading drives outside of a hardware managed array is indeed why I recommended backing up any valuable data before making changes to the S352BU313R. I will continue to highlight that when I can.
The fact that data may not be accessible on the drives outside of the RAID array will be true of many hardware-based RAID systems since they will often use non-standard partitioning and formatting on the hardware and present managed volumes to the operating system.
To be perfectly honest, I would not consider a single RAID1 array a backup solution. It is certainly a solution for high availability. So in the event that a single drive fails, you can continue to operate. However if data on the volume is deleted, or compromised, the change is immediately mirrored on both disks. Also if the enclosure itself is ever damaged the data may be difficult to access on the drives. Both of these factors mean that a hardware based array is a single point of failure with regard to a back up solution.
For a true back up solution one of the strategies I have seen recommended often is the 3-2-1 strategy. This is where you would maintain 3 copies of your data, 2 copies on different media or hardware locally, and 1 copy offsite, this can be on a cloud back up solution for example.
The S352BU313R and the S352BU33RER could certainly be part of a back up solution with this strategy.
I do understand that it is difficult to make backups of very large volumes and I personally have had to consider the challenge of balancing reliable back ups of the data I value, and my budget.
If you need the ability to remove disks from the enclosure then JBOD will be the safest way to configure the enclosures. In JBOD mode, the controller on the enclosure will essentially be bypassed and the operating system will be able to partition, format, and access the disks directly as two separate hardware units. To answer your question, yes, physically and logically separate drives. You can then set up a software RAID in Linux and rely on that system for maintaining the array.
I hope that explains things a bit better and that you are able to get up and running confidently.
Sincerely,