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Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP

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Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!

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Best,
Sander

Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook)
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arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript

I have lots of external, multi-TB drives I've purchased over the years, sitting in USB enclosures. Semi-retired, and for the most part, collecting dust.

Over the years, for many reasons I won't get into, I've lost faith in the whole concept of RAID. I'd rather have these drives each operate on its own rather than trying to build a big pool of drives with hardware/software that's supposed to have the smarts to rebuild itself when one drive dies and you just put in another drive to take its place. Sounds great in theory but...like I said, I won't get into this.

The problem with my collection of external drives is that they each require a power outlet and USB cable. If one drive isn't going to be used for a few days or even weeks, it's pointless to have it spinning 24/7, and external drives typically don't have a power switch or button; you have to physically unplug its wall wart. Products from Drobo, Synology, QNAP and others and not contenders IMO, and are complete overkill to me, not to mention seriously overpriced (but then, that's because they have features I don't want/need).

I found this thing on Amazon, which is essentially a 10-drive USB enclosure where each drive can be made to work independently and has its own power button. Sounds perfect to me. I really don't want anything more complicated. And being able to power on/off any drive independently sets it apart from everything else that tries to be too sophisticated for its own good.

Unfortunately it's listed an currently unavailable. Their smaller versions (4 or 5 bays) seem reasonable, but unfortunately, reading posted comments, there's no middle ground - people either rave about them, or warn about them being junk (drives disappearing on their own randomly for a few moments, Windows reporting hardware errors, etc).

Does anyone have hands-on experience with these types of docks and report their honest opinion - again, not looking for a RAID, and I would really, really prefer something where each drive can be powered on/off on its own.

I've had one of these Yotamaster 4-bay[^] running OpenMediaVault on a RPi for a couple of years and it has been a good experience. You can't turn them on or off individually though!

PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer is finally available for download.
JaxCoder.com

I have opened up a few such external USB drives. Every single one has had a standard SATA disk inside, with SATA power supply and SATA data bus. The disks are certainly not 'native USB'; the enclosure contains a SATA-to-USB adapter and voltage converter to provide SATA power. (The SATA power connector carries both 3.3V, 5V and 12V - obviously, the voltage converter can be limited to those voltages that specific drive requires.)

If your PC cabinet is a large tower-type with space available for more disk, pick the SATA disk out of its USB cabinet, and plug it into a SATA cable to your mainboard. My cabinet has room for eight SATA disks. My power supply has (in addition to the standard 24 + 4 + 6 cables to the mainboard) five sockets for cables with either 4 SATA power plugs each or the old style 'molex' plugs. If you run out of SATA power, you probably have unused molex plugs; molex-to-SATA adapters are readily available. (Molex has no 3.3V, so if there are disks requiring that, they may not work with those adapters, but I have never experienced that.)

Moving the disks into your cabinet, making them SATA disks, will probably speed up access - I assume that most of your old USB disks are pre-USB3, but are USB2, which is significantly slower than SATA. You don't need any special software or configuration; the disks will appear just like your C: disk (and D: and E: and ... if you've got other disks). For the 24/7 spinning issue: Windows allows you to specify the idle period before the disk is powered down. I believe that the default is 20 minutes, but you can set it to a few hours, or 'never', if you like (but that is opposite of what you ask for!)

If you do not have disk slots available in your cabinet, I suggest that you rather buy a new cabinet with enough space and move all your stuff over to it. Maybe you even run out of mainboard SATA sockets, but if you have an unused PCIe slot, an adapter for two or four SATA units is not that expensive.

I've been building PCs since my teens, so while this is the obvious solution, what makes it a non-starter is that the disks will then be left to spin 24/7, which is exactly what I don't want to do. Yes, Windows will spin them down after a timeout period if you let it, but any app that tries to enumerate drives, even when seeing them in that state, will cause Windows to spin them up again needlessly 50 times a day.

Not to mention that if they're just in sleep mode, the fact that they're connected and accessible leaves the data vulnerable to ransomware attacks. If they're physically powered down (and not merely sleeping), it's as good as being disconnected.

Just curious... what will you be using "lots" of "multi-TB drives" for? Maybe the application will help define other parameters or options.

If you are an active photographer, video man and/or you work a lot with sound, the terabytes tend to fill up fast.

I've got quite a few "small" disks myself - in the range 500G to 2T - but I am in the process of filtering the important stuff over to fewer larger (12-16 TB range) disks.

Except from my own video / photos / sound recordings, one 16T disk is filled up with my collection of BDs, DVDs and CDs.

trønderen wrote:
If you are an active photographer, video man and/or you work a lot with sound, the terabytes tend to fill up fast.

Sure - I never implied (or meant to imply) that his data storage requirements were not legit.

Only that frequent immediate high speed access to terabytes of data is different than rare / occasional low speed access and the storage solutions for each situation should probably differ.

I went through an intentional data purge a few years ago and used the following questions:

1. When I die does anybody really want or need this crap?
2. Do I really need this crap today - or do I just think I need it?

Turns out my personal storage requirements were drastically reduced and easily handled with cheap cloud based solutions.

I feel that, as a personal frustration.

I did my last significant video project about seven years ago, covering an event with about 1500 participants, hoping that a significant fraction of them would want the video as a memory. I guess I spent like 2-300 hours on the editing and afterwork. How many people cared for the video? Maybe 50, and half of them were the participating organizations, not individuals. When I asked around, people shrugged, 'I was there, I know how it was and need no video of it'.

So why care? Who cares about books nowadays, when they can find the movie adaptation on a streaming service? Who cares to go to the mountain when excellent wildlife movies are available from National Geographic? Who cares for cookbooks with all those excellent catering services, delivering delicious meals at your doorstep?

Once I thought I would leave behind an extensive library of music, movies and literature that would be enjoyed by those who come after me. I thought they would appreciate how I had kept memories from the past, for them to enjoy. I thought those who shared my free time hobbies and activities would like to preserve those memories of achievements and joy.

No, they don't. Keep your files while you enjoy it yourself, whether photos, video or music. Keep your library of books while you still read them. If you no longer care for them yourself, you may of course throw them away. Noone else will care.

'Culture' is something carried over from one generation to the next. We don't. We are a society void of culture.

fgs1963 wrote:
Only that frequent immediate high speed access to terabytes of data is different than rare / occasional low speed access and the storage solutions for each situation should probably differ.

Right. My drives are just fine where they are; I don't need "frequent immediate high speed access". It's just that when I do, I don't want to go around reaching for a specific drive, hook up the power and USB cables, and then undoing that again after I'm done. That's the part I want to avoid. Leave them all connected, but physically powered down.

This one[^] is available and might do the trick. Much cheaper than Sabrent.
Here is the Sabrent unit[^] that is available.

I don't have any experience with them but I'm guessing they work fine for your use case.

I've always struggled with Outlook / Office / Microsoft / name de jour 365 and its contact management. I have a list of addresses. But they are sometimes referred to as contacts. Or folders. And some dialogs give you all your contacts. Some, when you select "All address books" show that you have no contacts. Or random AD addresses from 15 years ago.

So I'm trying to move all my personal accounts from Office, I mean Microsoft, work account to my personal account. I figured I'd just create a new contact list and apply a rule to any email that arrives and is in that contact list.

I feel like I'm in the worst sort of government bureaucracy:

Well, sir, it looks like you're trying to manage People, not Contacts, but be sure that you aren't looking at Addresses, unless you want to create a Group which provides its own email list and space for Conversations, but if you're trying to move a Person from Contacts you need to decide which List or Group, unless you want to move it to a Folder. Now: have you considered creating a Category for Person in your Contacts, but not your Addresses, and when I say Addresses, I mean the Global Address book and...

Head asplodes.

Whatever happened to a list of contacts. An "All" list, and then other lists based on need. And when I say "all" I mean: show me all contacts, not "all except the ones hidden in that random list under that subcategory in that obscure dialog that's so old it has Office 2010 styling".

I hate that a company with the vast, vast resources such as Microsoft won't invest the time needed to simplify the legacy baggage that's lying around. Or better yet: remove it. Provide a migration tool, and kill the old system. They want everyone on Azure, for everything, anyway.

cheers
Chris Maunder

Well Sir
Ok, I see CP is not MS...
but nevertheless there is also this and that on CP since ... and not fixed ... to make it more comfortable Blush | :O