Best eSATA JBOD?

redlandmover writes "I already have an HP Media Server (upgraded processor, and memory) that has already been upgraded internally to 3.5TB. I'm sure everyone already has their favorite backup solution (RAID, WHS, a billion external hard drives, etc). My question is: what is the best JBOD (Just a Bunch of Drives), eSATA-connected, external hard drive enclosure? (Preferably, at least 4 drives.)"

Comments

The best ESATA isn't really ESATA at all.

[Penguinoflight]

ESATA is meant as a simple solution to replace the usb 2 interface on external drives. It solves the bottle-neck for a single drive, but doesn't scale well.

You're better off with an SAS external enclosure and a SAS card with external connections. These can be expensive, but will pay for themselves quickly with the lack of extra management.

Re:Wut

[Kadin2048]

The PC Guide people are morons. Maybe that's what "JBOD" means in the Windows world, but if I hooked up a bunch of drives and told the controller I wanted JBOD, and what I got was a single volume spanned across the drives, I'd probably toss the thing out for being defective. Or at least criminally poorly documented.

JBOD means "just a bunch of disks." Emphasis on bunch. It means "don't RAID this, don't span it, just give me a bunch of goddamn block devices." Typically this is because you want to do something with the devices at a higher level than the disk controller. (Like you're going to do a software RAID, or you're using some application that spreads its files across multiple disks and does redundancy itself, like some enterprise storage management products do.)

Spanning is a whole different story. I don't really like spanning (why would you span and get all the downsides of RAID 0 stripes, without the I/O?), but I can understand some situations where it might be appropriate. However, it's something that you build at the filesystem/OS level across a JBOD arrangement that's presented by a disk controller.