Comments on: Caddie Overload?

By: Keith

Keith — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:21:31 +0000

I finally got something that works great. It is the Rosewill R2-JBOD 3.5″ USB 2.0 DUAL-BAY External Enclosure from newegg.com (http://bit.ly/10CTG5). Price was $50 US and it worked flawlessly. Granted, I’m giving up my 4 bay hotswap tray Icydock enclosure for this 2 bay model, but that is irrelevant when you consider one works and one doesn’t!!

The Icydock enclosure felt cheap right out of the box. Trays were flimsy, and I hated that stupid polished white Mac look. I should have never bought it.. .ugh. Now I’m stuck with a USB paperweight.

Anyway, the Roswill model I bought has JBOD, which allows both drives to be seen independently (which is what you want with WHS so that WHS can manage the redundancy). This thing was a bargain if you ask me. It is very solid and well fit together so there is no rattle noises or electronic humming.

By: Keith

Keith — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:58:07 +0000

Slow transfer is not really a problem. Well, if you are just using WHS for storage, then who cares, right? It’s not like I have any disc IO intensive things going on… I’m just storing a crap load of music, pics and videos.

Anyway, I love the Atom board/chip concept too. So tiny, cheap, and performs great. It’s a real pain though that I can’t get external storage working in a reliable fashion.

The MS dream of having a hodgepodge of varied drives, all strung together and working as one failed miserably for me.

I am considering ditching the Icydock enclosure and going with some other type of individual bays (maybe these caddies). I guess I’ll post here if/when I make a decision in case anyone is interested.

By: TheJudge

TheJudge — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:46:04 +0000

Interesting concept. I like the Atom board/chip. Pretty inexpensive really. I’ve not understood the choice of USB drives as data transfer is slower and I too have read a lot about issues with setting up an array of USB drives on WHS.

May look into a small form factor set up, but fully contained in one box.

By: Keith

Keith — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:49:33 +0000

I’d be very curious to know how this works out. I have had numerous problems with external storage and WHS for a long time now. It has never been 100% rock solid. I started out using WHS in beta.

I went with individual external enclosures for a while. I don’t know if it’s the heat, the enclosures, the drives or what… but I occasionally would have a drive fail.

I got tired of the clutter (much like you have in the pic), so I went with an Icydock 4bay extender. It has 4 trays, 1 power supply, and the output is USB. Perfect. I thought anyway.

I’m already having nightmares. I’ve gone through dumping all backups twice now. Drives keep disappearing and/or not showing up at all. I power the bay off/on, reboot, scan for new drives. It’s hit or miss.

I’m running this on a low end MSI desktop from newegg. External enclosure is from Newegg as well. It’s really quite annoying.