I’m looking to expand my storage. I’ve been slowly buying external hard drives for all my media. I’m a noob so feel free to explain things like I’m 5. I’m assuming for the most part the internal and external drives are relatively the same for HHDs with the main difference being what it’s put in. Will a 4 bay non-raid enclosure last longer or work better on average than an exclosure like for example on the WD Elements external hard drive.

  • TADataHoarderBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I’m assuming for the most part the internal and external drives are relatively the same for HHDs with the main difference being what it’s put in.

    For the most part that is correct.
    At least for desktop externals (ones with a power adapter, not portables) they’re usually just standard HDDs you can shuck.
    There are some weird cases like with portable externals having native USB on the HDD itself (no SATA at all) and for a while many externals were a hit or miss in terms of CMR/SMR but the same can be said about retail HDDs so that issue isn’t specific to externals.

    Will a 4 bay non-raid enclosure last longer or work better on average than an exclosure like for example on the WD Elements external hard drive.

    4-Bay DAS boxes typically use USB3 5Gbps and the bandwidth is shared for all drives. Many don’t even support UASP which reduces performance. This all results in a bottleneck when trying to transfer data around from multiple drives. Individual USB enclosures don’t have this problem since each drive has its own USB3-5Gbps to SATA adapter but those cheapshit enclosures you get with WD Elements take up lots of room and let the drives get very hot (~45c idle up to 65c+ after large transfers) if your room doesn’t have airflow (ceiling fan/etc, if you don’t feel the air moving, the drives don’t) since they have no cooling.

    If you can deal with shared bandwidth (or are willing to pay extra for 10Gbps/20Gbps USB units to avoid a bottleneck) being a bottleneck then multi-bay enclosures are usually an upgrade in every other aspect.
    They are more compact. 4-Bay DAS boxes are usually all smaller than 4 Elements/Easystores/MyBooks lined up.
    They only require one power adapter+data cable.
    Almost every DAS unit has a power button, but unfortunately not all of them have power buttons per drive which would be awesome.
    Most importantly they all have fans to cool your drives.

    If active cooling is the only reason you’re really looking at DAS enclosures you can get that for much cheaper with a USB fan like this.
    https://www.amazon.com/AC-Infinity-MULTIFAN-Receiver-Playstation/dp/B00G05A2MU/
    One 120mm fan is the perfect size to cool 3 WD Externals lined up. If you’ve got 5+ drives then consider the dual fan model.
    https://www.amazon.com/AC-Infinity-MULTIFAN-Receiver-Playstation/dp/B00JLV4BWC/

    • Far_Marsupial6303BEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      For the most part that is correct.

      At least for desktop externals (ones with a power adapter, not portables) they’re usually just standard HDDs you can shuck.

      There are some weird cases like with portable externals having native USB on the HDD itself (no SATA at all) and for a while many externals were a hit or miss in terms of CMR/SMR but the same can be said about retail HDDs so that issue isn’t specific to externals.

      All 3.5" externals are regular SATA drives.

      All 2.5" WD and Toshiba externals have the USB interface integrated into the mainboard. 2.5" Seagate externals are regular SATA drives.

      All 2.5" externals >500GB are SMR. There’s currently only a few 1TB 2.5" internal CMR drives available.

      All WD drives, 8TB+ are CMR. All Seagate drives 10TB+ are CMR. Unsure about Toshiba.