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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.)"
The Rosewill RSV-S8 is pretty much exactly what you've described. It's an eSATA enclosure with 8 drive caddies, a power supply, and a fan. It presents the drives to the system as JBOD or one of the various common versions of RAID (implemented in software, I assume). Ignore the comically inflated MSRP; it's $300 on Newegg. It ships with its own eSATA card for compatibility purposes, but I assume it would work with any eSATA adapter that followed the proper specifications. There's also a five drive version available for about $100 less, give or take. I can't speak to the reliability or ease of use, but this sounds like it will fit your requirements.
Despite being at the forefront in almost all areas of number theory, Kummer was renowned for being very poor at elementary arithmetic. (A number theorist who was poor at arithmetic!) One story has him standing at the blackboard during a lecture, unable to compute 7 times 9. One mischievous student suggested 61, so Kummer wrote this on the board and started to continue. Another mischievous student shouted out that it was 69 not 61. At this, an exasperated Kummer, said "come on gentlemen, it can not be both". Later, it was rumoured that he told colleagues, he should have known the answer since it couldn't be 61 or 67, because 61 and 67 are primes and it couldn't be 65 because 65 is a multiple of 5, and he should have realized 69 was too large because 7 times 10 was only 70, so the only odd number left in the sixties was 63.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
Talk about being old-fashioned. Sorry but you're wrong and all the disk-to-disk backup manufacturers would like to have a word with you.
In all seriousness I'm sure nobody believe you can't have a RAID off-site that is online running snapshots periodically. This protects you from fire, viruses, are equipment failure and at least in my case, allows for business continuity which is pretty important these days.
Of course I do go one further and backup to a 100TB library but thats largely because I don't want to maintain that much online capacity if I don't have to especially since I already had to purchase it once for my main SAN.
Use modern technology, you'll find it much more friendly. Most modern network storage strategies work out great. ZFS does snapshotting making it easy to deploy on small scales. Windows only? Well that's no problem either since you have Volume shadow copy and DFS based on whatever schedule you would like.
I go one further with DFS/VSC and use NetApp snapshotting on the back-end which mirrors the snapshot to another array at another building. Works out great and the only maintenance is the occasional swap out of hard drives when the RAID controllers preemptively fail the drive because they detect abnormalities that will lead to failure.