Jump to content
  • 0

Icy Box IB-3810U3 JBOD + Drivepool


AlexL

Question

Hi, I am still looking to expand my storage and am wondering if anyone has any experience with this enclosure ?

I was aiming for a fanless/silent box but it would cost me far too much and I would settle for this unit instead. I would probably disconnect the fan as it's not going to get used to that extent that it does need it.

Also, will Scanner be of any help ? I am not sure I will be able to see SMART..

Thanks!

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 answers to this question

Recommended Posts

  • 0

Not personally, no.

 

 

As for the fanless/silent thing, just keep in mind that housing a bunch of drives will cause it to get very warm, and very quickly.  

 

 

As for StableBit Scanner, it's hard to tell without testing first.  However, given that this is USB only from appearances, USB chipsets tend to be much more reliable about SMART data, so I don't foresee issues with the 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

An update seems in order. It has dropped USB once and made my disks RAW because one of the drives is dead. I formated the disks with GPT now and checking scanners SMART as well to be sure. Stress testing all drives one by one doesnt seem to bring the interface down, so I guess it was just a timeout on the drive causing this.

 

Also, I will be replacing the 120mm fan, because that thing makes me dream of F35's! ;) 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

OUch, sorry to hear that. And formatting as GPT may help prevent that from happening again in the future.

 

Also, if the disk shows up as RAW, always try running a CHKDSK pass on it first. In many cases, this can repair the damage and return the disk to a working condition. 

 

 

As for sound, I can't hear you over my server rack and AC.  :)

But yeah, I definitely understand.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

For posterity's sake:

So I have worked with this enclosure for quite some time without any hitch, achieving the max that my old drives can achieve (tested without drivepool, 50mb/sec).

Now for the box itself, you get it with 2 fans, one 140mm [placeholder for name and specs here] for the harddrives and a 80mm [placeholder for name and specs here] for the power supply, that had about 20 more dB output that I hated, living in an apartment and all.

So I replaced these with a "Noctua NF-P14s redux-900 140mm" where the installation without a hitch, and a "Noctua NF-R8 redux-1200 80mm" where I found that it could not be started without help, so I bought Y-cable connected to the 140mm as well (https://www.kjell.com/se/sortiment/dator-natverk/datorkomponenter/kylning/adapterkablar/grenkabel-for-datorflaktar-3-pin-p98538) because the pin connector ON the PSU won't be able to drive my 80mm Noctua(!).

All in all, the sound level in my room went from 56.3 dB to 39.6 db, which is like a breeze for me. The HDD's are at a stable 26C even at high load under a long time, which makes me confident buying fan regulators from aliexpress..

Next up, I had to rename all drives "Icybox <drive bay> (<version of the drive>/<size>/USB version>)" to make sure I knew what to hotswap in the unlikely event ( :D ) that a disk goes nuts.  "version of the drive" to not confuse the disks if they are ever connected in the same computer...

Snapraid is installed, as well as Elucidate for the GUI, with 2 parity drives for my 10 disk array, one disk being same size as the biggest in the array. I ran this the first time, and plan on running it once the balancing is done. 

Speaking of fail-safe, I also run Duplication in DP for now, just for the piece of mind until I have fully tested the snapraid app in a recovery mode.

I have 2 SSDs for the RAID write cache. For this I installed SSD Optimizer but it didn't kick in until a restart.

Thanks!

A

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Hey AlexL

I have this enclosure too. Working great for me so far, just a little noisy as you have found out! Thanks for the info on the fans, I will be buying the same ones and doing some surgery. Just a question for you though. 

Are both fans 3pin? I was wondering if they were PWM and maybe that's why the 80mm wasn't spinning up? Or maybe it's just a higher voltage needed to get it spinning?

I assume the enclosure does not mind if a fan is not plugged into the PSU fan header? Did you simply split the 140mm fan header to both fans?

Thanks!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0
On 11/15/2017 at 9:02 PM, ubern00b said:

Hey AlexL

I have this enclosure too. Working great for me so far, just a little noisy as you have found out! Thanks for the info on the fans, I will be buying the same ones and doing some surgery. Just a question for you though. 

Are both fans 3pin? I was wondering if they were PWM and maybe that's why the 80mm wasn't spinning up? Or maybe it's just a higher voltage needed to get it spinning?

I assume the enclosure does not mind if a fan is not plugged into the PSU fan header? Did you simply split the 140mm fan header to both fans?

Thanks!

Hi!
After a few months one of the drives went haywire making the whole array to behave inconsistently, but a good old "chkdsk c: /r /scan /perf" brought it back to life.

As for the fans, they are 3-pins yes, and worked fine in other mobos, but I guess the pins on the power supply wasnt outputting what needed to be outputed..

The enclose doesnt mind if a fan doesnt exist inside the PSU no. I took the cable from the PSU, split that for both fans to work. This does mean that BOTH fans stop working if the unit is plugged in but without any of the disks are turned on, so use with caution!

BR,
Alex

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Yesterday one of my disks turned to RAW, then the partition turned to a blank partition, so I had to forcefully remove it from DrivePool!

Since its NTFS, I downloaded TestDisk ( https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step ) and repaired the partition list. After a reboot, drive turned up all good and drivepool picked it up without a hitch!

Thank god for keeping it simple with NTFS and DrivePool!

 

EDIT:
One of the things that really annoyed me with DrivePool was that I couldn't see what was missing once the drive took a dive. You have something in the works about that @Christopher (Drashna) ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

I'm sorry to hear about that.  In some cases, a "chkdsk" pass will fix this. But not in this case, from the sounds of it.

TestDisk is a good solution though! 

 

7 hours ago, AlexL said:

One of the things that really annoyed me with DrivePool was that I couldn't see what was missing once the drive took a dive. You have something in the works about that @Christopher (Drashna) ?

Not at the moment.  We're trying to finalize changes to DrivePool and CloudDrive, and then after releasing those, StableBit Scanner. 

 

But there are ways to do this.  "dir > list.txt" works.  So would "tree > list.txt".  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Hi Christopher,
I am aware of the command line options, but deem it an ugly solution since the reason for using Windows for NAS is to get away from the cmd line hassle ;)

Since Drivepool already scans the filesystem like all the time, I would like to propose creating .txt files as place holders every time Drivepool moves a file.

BR,
A

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Yeah, I definitely understand that. 

However, adding a utility to do this wouldn't be a small/simple thing, and we're nor really ready to add something like that, right now.  In the future, maybe. it's bee something that I've been pushing for, for a while, as well.

Otherwise, "enable duplication on everything", and it's not a great answer, either. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Answer this question...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...