Sabrent external enclosure (semi thread necro).

[fleggett1]

I'm on the cusp of purchasing this thingamajig, probably in the next 2-3 days:

https://sabrent.com/products/ds-uctb

I'll be attaching it via a USB-C cable.  I just need to know if there's anything I need to do wrt Drivepool before removing them from my Norco.  From what I understand, all the pooling information is stored on the pooled drives themselves and the order in which they're placed in drive bays don't matter, but I just want to dot all my T's and cross all my I's.  I won't be doing anything crazy, like RAID or unRAID, just messing with DP (and Scanner).

Please let me know before I put shotgun holes in my credit card, as the Sabrent ain't cheap.  Thanks muchly in advance!

[Christopher (Drashna)]

It's a good question.  It depends on if the enclosure does anything weird with the drives.  It's not too common, but it happens.

Assuming that it doesn't do anything weird, you should be able to power off the system, pull the drives, and then move them over to the new enclosure. No issues, no fuss. 

[fleggett1]

Okay, Christopher, I'm gonna get it.  If all goes according to plan, I'll post in here.  If something goes wrong, I'll also post in here, but I might also wind-up haunting your dreams.

Wish me luck!

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Good luck!

Worst case, empty out a drive, move it over, and repeat. 

[fleggett1]

Har har, you're assuming I have drives to spare.  Remember that I'm taking a chance on the Sabrent because I suspect my Norco has been cooking drives and I lost a bunch last year.  And there's a current drive that's throwing intermittent SMART errors (cheeky bugger).

I ordered it last night.  Should be here this weekend.  I just hope the fans don't chase me out of my home, as I hear they're on the loudish side.

[fleggett1]

It's alive, it's alive!

...but with a caveat.  My system is so old that it doesn't have a native USB-C port, so I had to buy an internal card with several that's natively recognized by Windows 10/11.  I don't know if that affects anything, but the caveat is that it takes the Sabrent a few seconds after the desktop appears to fully spin-up all the drives.  This screws with one application I'm running in a fairly minor way, as the pool isn't initialized at that point, and is work-aroundable.

Scanner is...interesting.  Every drive on the main menu shows-up as an "ASMT ASM235CM SCSI Disk Device", but if you look at the disk information, it's all good, with the correct manufacturer, model, serial, etc.  SMART data also appears to be coming through.  This same label also appears in Device Manager for every drive.  If you assign a manual name, though, that label appears in Disk Management (I've labeled all mine).  The "labeled" name also appears in Drivepool.  I guess it doesn't particularly matter, but maybe you can try to have the "labeled name" display in Scanner in a future version, as that would be much handier.

Oh, something else that's neat - you don't have to do the 3.3V hack with the Sabrent, which is something I had to do with the Norco.  This is doubly good, as you then don't have yellow tape potentially gunking-up the SATA connector.

Apart from the spin-up delay and the device names, everything seems good.  The fans are super-quiet, so I don't know why people were complaining about that.  The one bad thing is that it came with a ridiculously short power cord, so I had to dig-up one of my own.

Anyone have any questions?