Cheap External 5 Bay Sata Enclosure?

[Zhen'ka]

So... I am setting up a small server for a project. It's going to be running TrueNAS. I guess I was a bit surprised that there aren't any standard external enclosures that can hold 5 or 6 drives and just pass-through SATA.

Here is what I mean... A simple SAS HBA in IT mode can be bought for like $30 bucks. The problem these days is with finding a good case that can hold 5/6/7/8 hard drives. You got a few like, for example, Fractal Define R5.

I thought I could buy an external enclosure, and just use a break-out cable to connect it to the back of the HBA card.

The closest thing I could find is something like this RackChoice Enclosure.

But I mean, for $100 bucks? And why isn't there an option to power the drives from a regular power brick? Why only 2 molex connectors? And frankly, this is the cheapest option, which kind of sucks.

Every time I try to plan it out, it makes no sense. Why wouldn't I just bite the bullet and buy an ATX case like the R5 for about the same price and just transplant everything from my current case?

What am I missing?

 

[Chriggel]

What you're looking for did exist as a niche product many years ago. A desktop style drive enclosure with nothing but, for example, 8x3.5" bays, a small PSU and two SFF-8088 connectors to connect to a HBA or Raid controller in your PC. I remember Areca was one of the companies who offered such enclosures. Turns out, they're still in this business today: ARC-4038 | JBOD / Expander Box | 廣安科技 Areca
Don't get a shock if you're trying to buy one and see the prices, if you can even find a shop that sells these. This was basically aimed at the same niche market as todays Thunderbolt enclosures, something Areca has transitioned to as well. It was mostly meant for media production and similar use cases. The idea was that you could connect the drives to a system that would otherwise not have the space for the same amount of drives. Just like todays solutions, they had fairly very low volume production runs and were expensive.

To put it into perspective: We were just coming out of an era of SCSI drives (similar solutions for external SCSI enclosures did exist as well). SAS and SATA have just been introduced. NAS wasn't as fast as it is today. We're talking about mid to late 2000s. 10G did exist, but was cutting edge. There was a lack of fast external connections, so that was the solution for the problem. The fact that it allowed passthrough of the individual drives, which would make it perfect for ZFS, was just a by-product because external SAS/SATA connections were used. It wasn't designed for that and also it wasn't a DIY product. It was meant as a high price high performance addon for off the shelf workstations for professional use, most likely to connect to an Areca Raid controller to run a Raid 5 or 6 or whatever you needed.

In the DIY space, cases with the appropriate number of drive bays always existed so that you could mount the drives internally. Another option were cases with just 5.25" bays and you could mix and match 5.25" to 3.5" and/or 2.5" drive cages, like the one you found. This is still a thing today and it's an internal solution, that's why it has molex connectors and not a power input for an external power supply.

Fast forward to 2024, these enclosures were joined a long time ago by USB and then Thunderbolt enclosures and were mostly replaced by them, not so great for ZFS anymore. For the DIY people like us, companies still make great storage oriented cases, just like they did back then. You've mentioned the R5, which is old now, but the R7 and R7 XL only expanded on the great qualities of the Define family and are specifically made to house large amounts of storage. Same story with the Meshify 2 XL, for example. All of these are awesome, but pretty big cases, allowing for much more than 5-6 drives. Compact solutions exist as well, Silverstone has a whole lineup of compact server / NAS cases. Why you don't bite the bullet and get one of those? I don't know, you tell us!

 

[nabsltd]

The closest thing I could find is something like this RackChoice Enclosure.

But I mean, for $100 bucks? And why isn't there an option to power the drives from a regular power brick? Why only 2 molex connectors?

It's not an external enclosure...it's internal, to be installed in 3x 5.25" drive bays.

Good external 4-5 bay enclosures are expensive because they provide full bandwidth to every drive, good cooling and have a decent power supply. You can get cheap one that will bake your hard drives, or not be very fast (USB or a single eSATA port). Search for "4 bay external hard drive enclosure" on Amazon and you get plenty of hits for USB or eSATA connected enclosures.

 

[mattventura]

You can build your own external JBOD chassis for a reasonable price nowadays. Get a cheap 8-bay NAS case, throw a SAS expander in it, put a SAS HBA in the desktop.

But at that point, you're better off just using that as your actual case.

 

[R3Z3N]

Highpoint makes SAS enclosures:

https://www.highpoint-tech.com/rs6400-catalog

 

[aero]

Phanteks Enthoo Pro is a great cheap case that you can put a lot of drives in if you add a 3x5.25 -> 4x3.5

 

[Tech Junky]

The FD Meshify 2 has an internal rack for 13 drives plus there are other locations within the case for additional drives. There's also the XL version that holds even more.

There are other options though more drive centric

U-NAS NSC-810 Server Chassis

Compact 8-bay hot-swappable server chassis with or without power supply Comparison: 810 vs. 810A* If your shipping address is outside North America, please contact us (sales@u-nas.com).

www.u-nas.com

$190 gets you 8 bays to swap drives in/out of it.

 

[piranha32]

If you don't need hot-swap, many years ago I used this SATA enclosure: 8 bay SAS / SATA Bare 6G JBOD Tower w/SFF-8088 Connectors - B0806
Not exactly $100 budget, but was as much plug&play as it could be. Ran 24/7 for over 10 years without needing any service. I'm surprised it is still available for purchase.
A word of caution about cheap "hot-swap" enclosures: I had an iStar enclosure with power switches for each disk (iStarUSA BPU-340SATA-BPL 3 x 5.25" to 4 x 3.5" 2.5" SAS SATA 6 Gbps HDD SSD Hot-swap Rack - Newegg.com). Turned out that switching power on one disk was glitching power on all the disks. This is how I effed up an entire RAID5 array by trying to remove a disk, which was not part of it.

Re Areca: They taught me to never buy niche hardware with no support in the mainline kernel, or at least with source code available. I made a mistake of buying their RAID controller, for which drivers were distributed as binary kernel modules. Very quickly the company stopped supplying updated drivers, and I had a choice to either stick with an outdated kernel, or e-waste a perfectly fine working RAID card.