Geekzone: technology news, blogs, forums
Guest
Welcome Guest.
You haven't logged in yet. If you don't have an account you can register now.


Scott3

3943 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

#318508 24-Jan-2025 22:46
Send private message

I am moving my backups out of the cloud, and just brought a pair of 18TB drives so I can rotate onsite and off site.

Need 3.5" USB enclosures to mount them in.

Ideally I would have a locally available, reputable brand, mostly metal (for cooling), Sub $60 price point & USB C connection.

But such a product doesn't seem to exist. What you you do?



 

  • Just buy the $40 Orico enclosure from PBtech? It's got one metal panel, and Hey it is getting plugged to a USB-A port on the NAS anyway, so USB C was just a future proofing prefernce.
  • Order the Alloy case, USB-C enclosure from China and acceapt a slow delivery time.

Create new topic
fe31nz
1206 posts

Uber Geek


  #3335462 25-Jan-2025 00:02
Send private message

If you are going to be swapping the drives all the time, then an open air mount is probably better than a metal case enclosure.  What sort of 18 Tbyte drives do you have?  It is likely that they will be very fast, so you want a USB 3 enclosure/mount that will support them at full speed if possible.  So that means you want a USB 3 interface that supports UASP protocol:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Attached_SCSI

 

The cheapest one with UASP support from PBTech seems to be this one:

 

https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/ENCUNI3035/Unitek-Y-3035-USB31-SATA-HDD-enclosure---Supports

 

Another thing to watch out for is that some USB enclosures/mounts have an automatic timeout where they spin down the drive(s).  This can be very annoying if you do not want the drives to be spun down as there is usually no way to disable it.  It is better to have an enclosure/mount that does not do this, so you can just use the normal spin down controls on the drive itself.  The above Unitek enclosure says it has the spin down "feature".  It is often not mentioned in the descriptions that this "feature" is present.

 

If there is only a USB 3 cable supplied, you can get 3 to C adaptors or replace the cable with a USB-C one, so that is not really an issue.


 
 
 

Move to New Zealand's best fibre broadband service (affiliate link). Note that to use Quic Broadband you must be comfortable with configuring your own router.
Scott3

3943 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

  #3335464 25-Jan-2025 00:25
Send private message

fe31nz:

 

If you are going to be swapping the drives all the time, then an open air mount is probably better than a metal case enclosure.  What sort of 18 Tbyte drives do you have?  It is likely that they will be very fast, so you want a USB 3 enclosure/mount that will support them at full speed if possible.  So that means you want a USB 3 interface that supports UASP protocol:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Attached_SCSI

 

The cheapest one with UASP support from PBTech seems to be this one:

 

https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/ENCUNI3035/Unitek-Y-3035-USB31-SATA-HDD-enclosure---Supports

 

Another thing to watch out for is that some USB enclosures/mounts have an automatic timeout where they spin down the drive(s).  This can be very annoying if you do not want the drives to be spun down as there is usually no way to disable it.  It is better to have an enclosure/mount that does not do this, so you can just use the normal spin down controls on the drive itself.  The above Unitek enclosure says it has the spin down "feature".  It is often not mentioned in the descriptions that this "feature" is present.

 

If there is only a USB 3 cable supplied, you can get 3 to C adaptors or replace the cable with a USB-C one, so that is not really an issue.

 



Western digital Ultrastar data center DC HC550 Sata 6Gb/s 7200RPM.


Noted on the USAP

I looked at the unitek drive enclosure, but was worried by the comment saying it was running at hot at 59 deg C. Hence the desire for a metal case.


 

My thoughts were that keeping the drives in an enclosure would offer greater physical protection for the drive (and protect the drives integrated plugs from frequently insertion and removal), but I guess a dock style setup could work.

 

 

 

I'm fine with the drives spinning down when not in use (assuming they spin back up again). This is just a home use NAS, so the vast majority of the time it will be idle, so no backup changes required etc. Might as well save some power.

 

 


Scott3

3943 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

  #3335465 25-Jan-2025 00:30
Send private message

Orico enclosure on aliexpress is metal, USB-C & UASP accelerated

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007876198284.html

 

Just would rather not wait for delivery.




fe31nz
1206 posts

Uber Geek


  #3335466 25-Jan-2025 00:53
Send private message

Scott3:

 

Western digital Ultrastar data center DC HC550 Sata 6Gb/s 7200RPM.

 

 

I have two of these (WUH721818ALE6L4), so I can tell you that recent WD drives including these have a nasty noise problem.  When they are idle, they automatically do little head movements every few seconds for wear levelling reasons.  So if you are using them in a mount or enclosure or in a low noise environment (such as my HTPC in my bedroom), the little tick noises all the time can be very, very annoying, despite not being very loud.  Especially when you have two of them doing it at the same time.  I found it so annoying that I moved them to another PC and replaced them with Seagate Exos 20 Tbyte drives.  Before then, the only way to stop the annoying noise was to spin them down - there is no option to disable the wear levelling.  In the new PC they are fine (low noise case, and it is 3 metres away from me with other louder fans closer to me).


richms
28032 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted
Lifetime subscriber

  #3335588 25-Jan-2025 12:54
Send private message

These are not really a thing that you see much anymore as the drive makers sell their ready to go external drives for about the same price or less than an internal drive, so its better to just get yourself a WD Elements or whatever they call them now and call it job done.

 

I have had no ends of issues with orico 4 and 5 bay drive enclosures with drives dropping out leading to the storage space dying, drives just disappearing until the whole box was power-cycled, and the fact that if one drive was lagging out because it was a crap shingled one, the whole enclosure would lag out making the other drives also have massive delays to access them even for reads.

 

I have not used their single drive cases but the fact that they were totally useless about providing a software update for one of the boxes that was running old stuff, I would not trust the company for support. The aliexpress seller was of course no help at all.





Richard rich.ms

Scott3

3943 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

  #3335731 25-Jan-2025 17:09
Send private message

fe31nz:

 

Scott3:

 

Western digital Ultrastar data center DC HC550 Sata 6Gb/s 7200RPM.

 

 

I have two of these (WUH721818ALE6L4), so I can tell you that recent WD drives including these have a nasty noise problem.  When they are idle, they automatically do little head movements every few seconds for wear levelling reasons.  So if you are using them in a mount or enclosure or in a low noise environment (such as my HTPC in my bedroom), the little tick noises all the time can be very, very annoying, despite not being very loud.  Especially when you have two of them doing it at the same time.  I found it so annoying that I moved them to another PC and replaced them with Seagate Exos 20 Tbyte drives.  Before then, the only way to stop the annoying noise was to spin them down - there is no option to disable the wear levelling.  In the new PC they are fine (low noise case, and it is 3 metres away from me with other louder fans closer to me).

 



Thanks for the heads up. Planning to backup direct from MY NAS & My NAS is not going to end up in a noise sensitive location, so that should not be an issue for me.


Scott3

3943 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

  #3335751 25-Jan-2025 18:33
Send private message

richms:

 

These are not really a thing that you see much anymore as the drive makers sell their ready to go external drives for about the same price or less than an internal drive, so its better to just get yourself a WD Elements or whatever they call them now and call it job done.

 

I have had no ends of issues with orico 4 and 5 bay drive enclosures with drives dropping out leading to the storage space dying, drives just disappearing until the whole box was power-cycled, and the fact that if one drive was lagging out because it was a crap shingled one, the whole enclosure would lag out making the other drives also have massive delays to access them even for reads.

 

I have not used their single drive cases but the fact that they were totally useless about providing a software update for one of the boxes that was running old stuff, I would not trust the company for support. The aliexpress seller was of course no help at all.

 

 

I was getting the impression that 3.5" enclosures are a bit of a dying product line Guess it is a combination of:

 

  • The general demise of full factor desktop computing, meaning less people pulling 3.5" drives and putting them enclosures when they upgrade storage etc.
  • The general shift from spinning drives to (much more compact) SSD's
  • The general move to cloud services, especially for backup lessoning the need for external drives - Not that I have had to do an restore, but for those keeping their critical data on a laptop / desktop, blaze back is a great service. Only moving away from it as my move to a NAS triggers B2B pricing.
  • As you say, drive manufactures selling USB drives for cheaper than bare drives (hence the rise of shucking, Segate 16tb usb drive is NZD 403 free shipping, likely plus GST from amazon.com at the moment), making it illogical to buy a new drive and put it in a third party enclosure these days. I hate these pricing structure and associated e-waste generation.

I am already committed to the enclosure route. I have the drives now (currently running a 30 hour smart check in my NAS). I made this decision for a few reasons:

 

  • The ex data center drives were a really sharp price (& Local). Even with the cost of an enclosure works out hundreds of dollars cheaper (each) than an 18tb external.
  • I was able to ensure a highly regarded, data center grade drive. They are rated for a 550 TB annual workload, 2.5m hours MTBF. And it means I am able to be sure to avoid the slower SMR disks.
  • I have a 8 bay Synology NAS (it came up at a sharp price used), with many free bays, This purchase means that my backup drives match my NAS drives. I am aware that there are advantages to mis-matched drives, but the OCD part of my likes to have them matching. This gives me a clear upgrade path in the future, if I run out of backup space in say 3 years, I can upgrade the externals to say 30Tb drives, and put the 18TB drives into my NAS array.


My NAS has external eSata ports, I had assumed I would be best to run USB for this, but I could also use the external eSata ports & and eSata enclosure to get better performance abet at a slightly higher cost. Thoughts on that?

https://www.amazon.com/Vantec-NexStar-Gen1x1-Enclosure-NST-358SU3-BK/dp/B0BDKG16XT




Scott3

3943 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

  #3335823 25-Jan-2025 19:53
Send private message

PBtech has just launched a third 3.5" drive enclosure.

https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/MBE1037/mbeat-MB-HDD-35C1K-C1-Tool-Free-USB-30-35--25-SATA

 

USB-B connector, UASP & what I visually think is all plastic construction...



Can't work out if Synology NAS's support UASP on their external USB ports, but Assume I am best to go with a USAP enclosure regardless (for if I ever need to restore my backup to a PC).

 

Am I being too concerned about cooling? My drives are currently sitting at 41-42 C doing their 30 hour smart test in my fan cooled NAS (and the idle drives are 36 - 38 C), so will be fairly warm in a plastic case. But in backup duty their workload should be fairly light.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


fe31nz
1206 posts

Uber Geek


  #3335881 26-Jan-2025 00:52
Send private message

Scott3:

 

I was getting the impression that 3.5" enclosures are a bit of a dying product line Guess it is a combination of:

 

  • The general demise of full factor desktop computing, meaning less people pulling 3.5" drives and putting them enclosures when they upgrade storage etc.
  • The general shift from spinning drives to (much more compact) SSD's
  • The general move to cloud services, especially for backup lessoning the need for external drives - Not that I have had to do an restore, but for those keeping their critical data on a laptop / desktop, blaze back is a great service. Only moving away from it as my move to a NAS triggers B2B pricing.
  • As you say, drive manufactures selling USB drives for cheaper than bare drives (hence the rise of shucking, Segate 16tb usb drive is NZD 403 free shipping, likely plus GST from amazon.com at the moment), making it illogical to buy a new drive and put it in a third party enclosure these days. I hate these pricing structure and associated e-waste generation.

I am already committed to the enclosure route. I have the drives now (currently running a 30 hour smart check in my NAS). I made this decision for a few reasons:

 

  • The ex data center drives were a really sharp price (& Local). Even with the cost of an enclosure works out hundreds of dollars cheaper (each) than an 18tb external.
  • I was able to ensure a highly regarded, data center grade drive. They are rated for a 550 TB annual workload, 2.5m hours MTBF. And it means I am able to be sure to avoid the slower SMR disks.
  • I have a 8 bay Synology NAS (it came up at a sharp price used), with many free bays, This purchase means that my backup drives match my NAS drives. I am aware that there are advantages to mis-matched drives, but the OCD part of my likes to have them matching. This gives me a clear upgrade path in the future, if I run out of backup space in say 3 years, I can upgrade the externals to say 30Tb drives, and put the 18TB drives into my NAS array.


My NAS has external eSata ports, I had assumed I would be best to run USB for this, but I could also use the external eSata ports & and eSata enclosure to get better performance abet at a slightly higher cost. Thoughts on that?

https://www.amazon.com/Vantec-NexStar-Gen1x1-Enclosure-NST-358SU3-BK/dp/B0BDKG16XT

 

 

Go with eSATA - it is faster and much less complicated than USB.  Officially eSATA is only supposed to run at 3 Gbit/s, but like most eSATA devices that one says it does 6 Gbit/s, which you need to have for your drives to do full performance.  I have been using USB and eSATA mounts for a long time, and USB ones often do silly things that hamper what you want to do with them.  The translation into USB protocol and back into SATA protocol is not always done well.  With eSATA, it is just the same as a normal internal SATA port - all features of your drive work and the transfers run at full speed.  If you need to connect an eSATA enclosure/mount to a normal PC that only has internal SATA ports, you just buy a long SATA to eSATA cable and feed it through an empty slot on the back of the PC to a SATA port.  Or you can use an empty slot to put in a SATA to eSATA bracket with 1-4 eSATA sockets on it.  These sorts of things usually need to be ordered from Aliexpress now - it is rare to find NZ stock.  And eSATA connectors are more reliable than USB - I have never had an eSATA connection fail because the plug and socket did not connect properly.  With USB connections, the cat walking by can be enough to make a marginal USB plug and socket stop working.  The tolerances on USB connectors are too lax.


richms
28032 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted
Lifetime subscriber

  #3335910 26-Jan-2025 11:04
Send private message

Just dont be tempted by long esata cables or dirt cheap PCIe cards that offer it on a junk sata chipset + port multiplier that are still being made targeting chia miners (is that still a thing?)

 

You can get SAS plug to esata cables, which work great on single drive external enclosures, and that I found totally reliable with a HBA card, unlike the junky marvell based PCIe to esata cards I bought that would silently slip in some corruption every few 100 gigabytes transferred.

 

But UASP support basically gives the same performance as there is much less overhead than the older mass storage device modes, and it will work on any PC with a USB port, will fall back to mass storage if the PC cant support UASP and no spinning rust drive will care about the difference between 5 and 6 gigabits link speed.





Richard rich.ms

Scott3

3943 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

  #3336111 26-Jan-2025 22:19
Send private message

Thanks everybody for your help.

Decided I was in a hurry, so went and picked up that Unitek enclosure. Want to get the backup sorted so I can cancel my blaze back renewal at the end of next week.


 

eSata enclosures seem to be super rare (and I didn't want a USB 2.0 era one). AliExpress only had a eSata dock, not a enclosure. And while my personal Laptop has esata, it is very old. I don't have a desktop and esata seems to be a thing of the past on modern laptops.


Tested the enclosure out on my work laptop. Transfer speeds Peaked over 500 MB/s (4000 Mb/s), so it is plenty fast.

Set up hyperbackup on the synology now. (ended up putting the drive into ext4 format so restoring onto a windows machine would be a pain anyway). Files are transferring now. Transfer rate of ~70 MB/s, so it is bottlenecking elsewhere (I think large numbers of small files).


Scott3

3943 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

  #3336120 26-Jan-2025 23:00
Send private message

Can't work out if it is possible to check the drives internal thermometer, but just removed the cover and scanned the drive label with a contactless thermometer and it's at 41C. Fair to say the guts are fairly warm. Will run with the lid open for the initial backup at least.


old3eyes
9112 posts

Uber Geek

Subscriber

  #3336136 27-Jan-2025 08:12
Send private message

I'm in a simalar situation as the OP except I'm thinking of going to a mini pc but my existing tower has 3 internal HDs for video and storage. External SATA ports aren't really an option so it would have to be USB external drives. Will watch thread with interest. 





Regards,

Old3eyes


Create new topic





News and reviews »

Bolt Launches in New Zealand
Posted 11-Jun-2025 00:00


Suunto Run Review
Posted 10-Jun-2025 10:44


Freeview Satellite TV Brings HD Viewing to More New Zealanders
Posted 5-Jun-2025 11:50


HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14-inch Review
Posted 3-Jun-2025 14:40


Flip Phones Are Back as HMD Reimagines an Iconic Style
Posted 30-May-2025 17:06


Hundreds of School Students Receive Laptops Through Spark Partnership With Quadrent's Green Lease
Posted 30-May-2025 16:57


AI Report Reveals Trust Is Key to Unlocking Its Potential in Aotearoa
Posted 30-May-2025 16:55


Galaxy Tab S10 FE Series Brings Intelligent Experiences to the Forefront with Premium, Versatile Design
Posted 30-May-2025 16:14


New OPPO Watch X2 Launches in New Zealand
Posted 29-May-2025 16:08


Synology Premiers a New Lineup of Advanced Data Management Solutions
Posted 29-May-2025 16:04


Dyson Launches Its Slimmest Vaccum Cleaner PencilVac
Posted 29-May-2025 15:50


OPPO Reno13 Pro 5G Review 
Posted 29-May-2025 15:33


Logitech Introduces New G522 Gaming Headset
Posted 21-May-2025 19:01


LG Announces New Ultragear OLED Range for 2025
Posted 20-May-2025 16:35


Sandisk Raises the Bar With WD_BLACK SN8100 NVME SSD
Posted 20-May-2025 16:29









Geekzone Live »

Try automatic live updates from Geekzone directly in your browser, without refreshing the page, with Geekzone Live now.



Are you subscribed to our RSS feed? You can download the latest headlines and summaries from our stories directly to your computer or smartphone by using a feed reader.







GoodSync is the easiest file sync and backup for Windows and Mac