External enclosure for a 3TB drive

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analogsa

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Looking for a suitable USB/eSata or not too expensive NAS enclosure. Should have probably bought an external drive in the first place... Any confirmed as working suggestions appreciated.
 
It might be difficult as the standards had to change a bit for drives over 2TB. You'll need an external drive specifically stating it can accommodate 3TB drives.
 
This is the reason why i asked the question. Not sure which of the locally available enclosures is suitable. A NAS would in fact be better as it removes OS issues as well.
 
Already have the drive. Eventually it will be used as a system drive but for the time being i would like to use it for back ups. Avoided a prepacked external drive as it would likely be slower. I can probably live with an eSATA connection to the desktop and buy an eSATA PC card for the laptop but something tells me the express card may also be problematic. 3TB drives are really old by now, just amazing how the industry hasn't caught up. Most USB enclosures only take drives with standard 512 sectors so even the newer 2TB drives won't work.

Nobody here has faced this problem???
 
Nope because drives bigger than 2TB are still out of most people's price range given that you can basically buy 2 x 2TB's for the price of 1 x 3TB.

I have 3 x 3TB's so far, getting another 4 month end but I'm using them as internals only
 
The cluelessness about HD enclosures really surprised me. Matrix list suitable types on their web site but no stock at my local branch and the web pricing is humorous to say the least. Sybaritic indicated 4 weeks lead time and suggested an unsuitable replacement. After some googling i started looking for a local supplier of the Mukii Transimp enclosures. Finally some luck. Nivo indicated available stock and i placed an order. First experience with them and a shockingly positive one. Had the enclosure delivered less than 48 hours after placing the order. And it seems to work fine, both via USB and eSATA. They also had a more expensive model with USB 3.0 which may have been an even better choice.

3TB enclosures should already be mainstream. What is the point of buying an external enclosure even for a 2TB disk which already is obsolete? It seems some of the new 2TB disks do use 4k sectors, so they may aslo not work in older generation enclosures and docking stations.
 
There are predominantly 2 chips in use in USB 3.0 enclosures - The Asmedia ASM1051 and the JMicron JMS539/JMS551. The general advice seems to be to rather choose an enclosure that contains the Asmedia ASM1051 as the JMicron chips do not work well with certain motherboard controllers. The Sedna SE-EH-38-U which is also available online from Prophecy, Nivo etc. contains the Asmedia ASM1051 (confirmed by support). This chip is also used in the Vantec NexStar 3 SuperSpeed 3.5" SATA to USB 3.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure - Model NST-380S3-BK. One of the reviewers (first one) on Newegg claims to have got this unit to recognise a 3TB 5K3000 Hitachi hard drive so I would guess that it should be possible to do likewise with the Sedna enclosure - might require a firmware upgrade as explained in the Newegg review. You could try to e-mail Sedna support to get confirmation - they did reply to me promptly regarding a previous query. There is also a cheap Mapower USB 3.0 enclosure that *might* use the Asmedia chip - they apparently use both types interchangeably but this only has a 1.5A supply which may be underpowered for a 3TB drive. I think that the Mukii USB 3.0 enclosures use the JMicron chipset.

http://www.pinnacleafrica.co.za/Product/item.aspx?ID=33693
http://www.sednacomputer.com/
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...IsFeedbackTab=true&Keywords=(keywords)&Page=1
http://www.biosonline.co.za/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=13901

USB 3.0 HDD problems thread on Whirlpool ...
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1558885
 
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Thanks for the research and links. I don't know much about the SATA side of the protocols but know a bit about the USB side and it ain't rocket science. I would imagine a good embedded engineer should be able to update the 512 sector translation to also work with 4k. The Mukii turned out to use an Initio Inic 1610 chip which is basically an 8051 core with an usb 2.0 interface. A single 25MHz crystal for both SATA and USB sides. Apart from writing and verifying a couple of TBs i haven't done any other tests but it seems to behave well. The 8051 is certainly able to receive firmware updates if necessary.
 
+1 on the 'Thx for the Research' Yotch! Some nice info/links there. Bookmarked :)
 
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