I recently purchased a 14TB loose hard drive and need to throw it into a enclosure for backups.
However, all of the enclosures I've seen for a sane price state support for only upto 8TB drives e.g.: https://www.amazon.com.au/Simplecom-SE325-Tool-Drive-Enclosu…
Is that a real limitation, or just a typical garbage Chinese marketing mistake? If it's real, is there a way to tell for models that don't state either way? Any alternative recommendations?
The limit mentioned there is 8 zebibyte, not TB. USB interfaces can handle 8TB just fine.
Plenty of drives say 6TB or 10TB limits, it could just be all they tested on drives up to that size and no testing has been done on larger. So maybe there's some limitation in the USB controller in the enclosure, maybe it doesn't play happy as a boot drive with a large drive, maybe it's a heat issue.
Judging by the pure coincidence of the new limit being 8ZB rather than 2GB, I'd say a translation fail meant that the Chinese marketing specs probably put 8GB as if that's the same thing ….
Thanks for spotting that Freefall!
I have old vantec usb enclosures that say 2 tb is the limit for a sata drive, it worked up to 10tb, get a newish high quality enclosure and it should support up to 16tb.
FWIW I’ve been shucking and unshucking drives quite a bit lately and strange things can happen, like mismatches in disk size and file systems disappearing.
If the enclosure doesn’t say it supports over a certain size, I wouldn’t want to take that risk. And don’t assume that if you take a formatted drive with data and throw it in an enclosure that you’ll be able to read the existing file system.
Also, I realise that you’ve already got the drive, but for anyone else who is unaware, external USB drives in an enclosure are usually cheaper than bare drives, if you hunt around for deals.
Actually, for higher capacity drives it's way cheaper to buy them from East Digital, and you're also getting an enterprise drive with 3 years warranty. As long as you get a decent deal on a quality case for it - Or you can reuse one from a previous shucking - It's definitely the better deal, especially if you get in on the Group Buys.
In any case, the drive is brand new so there's no info on it. If the filesystem disappears upon inserting it into the enclosure I couldn't care less - as long as it lets me format a new, functioning one in of course.
I'm surprised with the sheer amount of shucking going on that there aren't LOADS of spare HDD enclosures on eBay. Are all modern enclosures not reusable for some reason?
Thanks for the info
The last drive I shucked was a WD 12TB that I'd been using externally for awhile, so it wasn't bought specifically to shuck but also knowing the option was there.
That drive was held in place by rubber corner pieces that were so specifically molded that none of my other drives come even close to fitting, I've never seen anything like this before. Also the case is clipped together and it's almost impossible to pull these apart without damaging one or two of the clips, and that is pretty typical. So it's not likely to be of much use to anybody else. It's a shame because I still have a ton of old bare drives.
Not all enclosures are so bad, but it's the older ones that were more generic inside, but then those are the ones that have issues with not recognizing larger drives properly.
So no, I don't think shucked cases are a good proposition for anybody.
Ahh yes - I've actually purchased just such an enclosure in the past. The rubber things must surely make a difference in terms of shock protection, I'm sure. However, I managed to shove a different brand of drive altogether into the enclosure anyway - it just took a tiny bit of patience, finagling, and cutting a protrusion off one of the rubber corners. The LED light on the drive doesn't show, and if you pick it up and squeeze it a bit it's obvious that it's been taken apart and shoved back together - But definitely still better than most of the crappy chinese designed plastic crap aftermarket enclosures I've used.
This Yottamaster enclosure is supposed to support up to 16TB. Some of the more expensive multi-bay enclosures support 18TB per drive.
Does it have to be an enclosure? I just throw my bare drives into a dock when I need to use them and then put them back into a plastic case after. They do get toasty so I usually have a USB fan blowing directly onto the drives when they are in use.
My dock is really old. It's a single bay, well over 10 years old but it still works like a charm. Honestly don't know if it has a TB limit but it seemed to handle all the drives I've thrown at it include my largest one, a 16TB one OK. Can always get a double bay one for cloning. They may be more expensive but it may be better/more useful in the long run especially if you get multiple drives.
Edit: Looks like mine is supposed to only accept up to 2 TB. I've used it a lot with much larger drives and have had no problems. I've copied a lot over the years and use Teracopy's verification after copying and haven't run into any problems. Guess it could be time for an upgrade anyway…
I mean, that sounds like a great solution for you - Why upgrade?
For me, alas yeah it has to be an enclosure, just for the portability and protection.
I guess I'm pretty pedantic about things and would want something that "supports" larger drives. Also, while I don't really need to clone anything right now I guess I could see myself maybe needed to somewhere down the track. I had a look a one of the more popular dual bay docks and it looks like it does come down to $35 every now and then, although it hasn't for a while. I just put a camel alert for it and if it comes down far enough I'll pick one up.
It's a limitation of the USB-SATA bridge IC's firmware
https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/35q6mrj3
USB 14TB External backup drives exist but I'm not sure how they get around this limitation. Perhaps WD and Seagate got their own proprietary tech that makes them possible to read larger than 8TB drives on USB interfaces.