Are there any external enclosures of the compact tower type that house 4-5 3TB drives and be used with older OS? I don't need the RAID, though JBDOG could work if it can tolerate being separated later on. Preferably the interface would be USB 3.0 or maybe SATA, but no sluggo GbE NAS stuff.
External Drives
- Thread starter LunarMist
- Start date
Stereodude
Not really a
eSATA won't work since you'd be limited to 2TB due to the whole 32-bit no GPT thing. USB would though.
ddrueding
Fixture
Agreed. You need a USB3 connection to be able to access all the drives in XP 32-bit. Or you could use ethernet.
time
Storage? I am Storage!
The fly in the ointment being that Lunar specified "older OS". I wonder which old OS you can get USB 3.0 host adapter drivers for?
XP64 is the oldest OS I would be using, but eventually perhaps Windows 8 if I make it. I know XP64 does not natively support the 3TB drives, but the USB 3.0 circumvents that. However, individual drives are out of the question. I need to replace at least a small 4-bay 8TB individual eSATA box. The onboard USB 3.0 works fine so far for single external drives.
Chewy509
Wotty wot wot.
Umm, XP x64 does indeed support 2TB+ drives. The only requirement is, that XP x64 can't boot from one, it must be a data only drive. (Source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463525 )
Or are you talking about a limitation of the drive controller you are using? IIRC, any controller and BIOS that properly supports the ATA-6 standard (which introduced LBA48 addressing) should work fine...
Since SATA1.0 (or SATA150 as some now call it) uses the ATA-7 standard, it natively supports LBA48 addressing as well...
Based on the above, I see no reason why eSATA can't be a viable connection option with XP x64?
Stereodude
Not really a
ddrueding
Fixture
Yup, so long as the oldest OS you use is XP x64, and you don't use a 2TB+ disk to boot, you are fine.