External enclosures that fit >2TB per drive

I have been trying to find a dual or quad bay external 3.5" enclosure and have yet to find any that definitively support hard drives greater than 2TB in size.

My goal is to have 2 or 4, 4TB drives in 1 enclosure. When those drives come out.

On Vantec's website ( Vantec ? Vantec NexStar MX - NST-400MX-SR - Dual 3.5'' SATA to USB 2.0 and eSATA with JBOD/RAID 0/1 External Hard Drive Enclosure) I found their dual bay enclosure, in which it claims to only support up to 2TB drives, but, I found this little asterisk(*More than 2TB can now be recognized under JBOD and RAID 0 mode. For more details, please refer to our Knowledge Base or contact us at [email protected].)

I don't really understand the addressing problem. The controller inside the enclosures surely support 48-bit LBA .. and the dual/quad enclosures are documented to support 4TB/8TB in total, so what is wrong with drives larger than 2TB in these?


Vista/7 32/64 bit should fully support larger than 2TB drives, except for booting (need 64-bit I think + GPT +4K sector compatibility). Confused.

 

By the way, this is the enclosure I'm interested in: Newegg.com - StarTech SAT3520U2ER Aluminum 3.5" Silver eSATA USB Dual SATA External RAID Hard Drive Enclosure

Dual bay, but Newegg shows the specs to only support up to 1.5TB! This is bull because what LBA bit-width is that?? Its probably just because hard drives were no larger than 1.5TB when this enclosure was released.. Kind of how new laptop computers claim to only support up to 750GB hard drives, which is bull too.
Googling the enclosure shows that it supports 2TB drives according to other website's details on it.

 

If you go to the manufacturer support page it says it supports up to 2TB.

 

I don't think there are any commercial drives out there yet with greater than 2 TB capacity, so no manufacturer is going to certify their enclosure for something that doesn't exist yet. After all, there's always the chance that when they do come out, they'll use some sort of unusual formatting or require something special to make them run. Something similar to how a lot of new drives are coming out with Advanced Format (4K sectors), and older OSes can't keep up.

 

There is the 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT, Hitachi 7K3000 and Western Digital 3TB Green drive so far. I might be forgetting one.

It may be that enclosure manufactures are waiting for more >2TB drives to come out, but eventually I hope that they will say what capacity they support (like up to 128Peteebytes(PiB)) <-- 48-bit Logical Block Addressing.

In other words I hope that 2 years from now that enclosures you see online don't say they support up to 6TB hard drives, when the hardware can support Petabytes of capacity addressing! It is annoying and it confuses computer newbs who actually think there is a capacity limit on their enclosures and on their new computers.. But anyway this thread isn't for me to rant!

 

Ah, I see. I don't think in terms of desktop usually, so I don't pay as much attention. As I said though, there could be simple things like format changes (like the afore-mentioned advanced format) that could screw up controllers. Probably the idea is that when new drives come out, they can either update their specs or come out with all "new" hardware to accomodate.

 

They probably have not updated their information yet, so take any "up to XTB" limitation with a grain of salt. And do not expect 4TB drives any time soon.

 

Sometimes manufacturers don't update their spec sheet on their website. I have yet to have a problem with an enclosure not seeing the full HDD size. Also old retail packaging isn't updated either (duh).

 

I posted this in the hardware forum:

Hitachi pave the way for 4TB and 5TB drives in 2011 - www.nordichardware.com

Though drives above 2.19TB do have a known problem with recognition. WD noted this and are selling their 3TB with a special HDD controller card.

http://www.myce.com/news/western-digital-launches-worlds-first-3tb-sata-hdd-35555/

"Consumers interested in having 3TB SATA HDD storage will need to run Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7, because Windows XP isn’t able to pick up the 4,096-byte per drive format. Specifically, HDDs used in older PCs normally can’t see above 2.19TB, because they use a master boot record (MBR) partition scheme.

The newer operating systems use the GUID partition table (GPT) that can utilize HDDs with higher storage capacities, including the WD 3TB HDD."

 

That article just says that current tech now has the density to possibly reach 4 or 5TB in the 2.5" form factor and that nobody knows if or when greater than 3TB capacity drives would be released. Considering it has taken 22 months to go from 2TB to the recently released 3TB drives, I don't think we should be expecting 5 or even 4TB any time soon.

PS: I'm glad too, because I finally got around to replacing my 'carnival' of drives with 2TB F4 Samsungs just a couple of months ago!

 

I think all the advanced format (4KB sectored) drives (at least Western Digital drives) will detect whether the OS that you are running is aware of 4KB sector technology or not and the drives will automatically emulate 512byte sectored drives if needed (XP). A performance hit of ~10% might be seen with writes to the drive.
WD Align should solve this performance penalty..

Yes, XP 32-bit can't see GPT partitions and can't boot from them, except 64-bit which can see them but not bootable (just as data disks). GPT partitions are needed for >2TB drives as MBR can't handle them and XP 32-bit doesn't support GPT.

Technology is fun!

By the way, a conclusion for anybody reading this thread in the future;
The LaCie 2Big USB 3.0 external enclosure supports at least 3TB hard drives if not higher capacity still.
LaCie is the premier manufacturer of high quality digital storage.