Windows 10: 4 bay external enclosure (non raid) connected to esata/sata

4 bay external enclosure (non raid) - connected via esata cable to sata port on mobo.
win 10 19042.631 64bit
asus Z87-a mobo
drivers up to date
Mediasonic ProBox HF2-SU3S2
AHCI in bios

Enclosure works fine on usb3.0
trying to free up a usb port and some speed by using esata.
Of course, only shows a drive after pc is powered on and enclosure already on.
Issue i'm having is, i have 4 drives in it.
(1) 1TB, (1) 2TB, (2) 8TB drives.
It only shows a single 8TB drive when esata is connected.

any ideas?

:)

 

Looking for a 4-bay USB 3.0 external HDD enclosure

I'm having a major issue with my current external hard drive enclosures (standard mechanic drives) that I'm trying to resolve in another thread so I won't go into that here:

Lost access to drive - "Access is Denied"

Basically on my new PC my current enclosures are either not connecting or dropping out/corrupting my drives. I lost a ton of data already. I have several Icy Dock Black Vortex enclosures and two older Mediasonics. The Icy Docks are both USB 3.0 and esata. One Mediasonic is USB 2.0 only and one is esata only. All are 4-bay enclosures.

So I'm trying to find a good enclosure that will play nice with my Gigabyte Z170x Gaming-7 motherboard. I have USB 3.0 on the motherboard plus I have a RocketRaid 622 esata card installed. The chipset of the motherboard is Intel Z170. Gigabyte suspects that the older enclosures might not be playing nice with the new chipset of my new motherboard. Icy Dock thinks differently and suspects it's my old WD Green drives at fault.

But there are very few affordable 4-bay enclosures available. Mediasonic makes one that is almost identical to my current Mediasonics except they are both USB 3.0 and esata now. I tried a Mediasonic USB 3.0 a couple years ago on my old PC and the USB didn't work at all with my old USB 3.0 card so I returned it. Maybe now it would work better on my motherboard's built-in USB ports? I dislike the cooling in the Mediasonics so I wish there was a better alternative.

Can anybody recommend any other external USB 3.0 4-bay enclosures? I have no idea what's causing my enclosure issues but to troubleshoot I need another unit and there seems to be a lack of affordable 4-bay enclosures to choose from. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

The Mediasonic I'm looking at is here:

https://www.amazon.com/Mediasonic-HF.../dp/B003X26VV4

 

Windows storage spaces with external 2 bay HDD enclosure


Hi there

I can't seem to decide what's the best way option connecting a 2 Bay HDD external enclosure to a laptop for maximum performance.

The HDD enclosure can connect via e-sata or a USB 3 connection -- I have to use the USB 3 connection as there's no e-sata external connection on the laptop. These enclosures only need 1 USB / e-sata connector as the hardware in the computer has the multi-port detection in it (been standard for ages these days).

The HDD enclosure has a built in switchable option - Run as RAID 0, Run as RAID 1, Run as JBOD (Just a bunch of Disks i.e it will show the whole thing as a single HDD) or as discrete disks -- i.e it will show 2 separate disks.

Now I want to use storage spaces so I'm tempted to use the "run as separate disks" option -- Windows will then see 2 HDD's which I can create into a storage space.

On these multi-bay relatively cheap HDD enclosures my impression is that the built in RAID controllers are far inferior to using Software -- on Linux that's certainly true - the mdadm kernel RAID works far superiorly to running these enclosures using built in RAID.

Any idea as to using these types of HDD's with Storage spaces vs the built in hardware RAID.

Cheers
jimbo

 

Rosewill R2 Raid Dual Bay Enclosure

The Rosewill R2 is a dual bay RAID enclosure for two 3.5" SATA HDDs. It supports connectivity via USB or eSATA. With the included software you can create RAID 0, RAID 1 or JBOD arrays for increased performance or data safety. Since eSATA offers the same performance as you would see from an internal drive, the RAID 1 performance is very impressive with over 108 MB/s.

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