SABRENT 10 Bay 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Tray Less Docking Station Expired

Is this the same company that makes hot dogs?

This is 10+ years too late for my need. Shame this wasn't a thing when I was first building raids for a home nas.

to be fair I didn't say anything about particulars on the CPU and memory here. I see platter drives and immediately think about how these things work and know you can piece something together that can utilize 10 platter drives for around the same cost with the ultimate real throughput you'd wind up seeing with something like this.

Now, if you're looking to utilize 10 platter drives all in a RAID 0 to just thrash data around with... I don't think you'd find something similar unless you interface directly with said system --
thrashing this way can be done with something like what this device is OR via SAS controller cards, which would be way cheaper but then you'd need to still power and house the drives.... which would still be way cheaper

the big benefit for a device like this is that this device is just plug and go. with how much NVME drives cost, I think I'd rather go with these in an enclosure over this... it's an odd case -- I can't think of why I'd want to use 10 platter disks to thrash data on unless I just had a lot of platter disks laying around already... and with hardware raids you usually want to just have same size, same brand, same everything going on -- so the likeliness of a use case like this goes way down to me...

to each their own, do what works for you -- I still think that if you want to be using platter based drives to serve up data in a normal usage scenario, you're still way better off designing your own system, it's still going to cost about the same and you'll have way more features

With this many drives, you really want a dedicated controller that can do more than just JBOD to get the best performance.

I can't even imagine how well a software RAID would work on this, so you definitely wouldn't want to use this for anything that requires heavy redundancy.

If you pair it with any of the mini PCs that get listed here and load it up with those refurbished server drives, it would make a pretty killer Plex server.

You could also just get 10 single drive USB enclosures for 20 bucks each and a 10 port USB hub for like 40 bucks. That would be functionally identical for 240 bucks. The issue is that's unwieldy and complicated. Just like building a 10 bay NAS when all I want is 3.5 inch bays accessible from any computer with a USB port.

Holy hell, how does a person plug in all those drives in an average home?

You could also just get 10 single drive USB enclosures for 20 bucks each and a 10 port USB hub for like 40 bucks. That would be functionally identical for 240 bucks. The issue is that's unwieldy and complicated. Just like building a 10 bay NAS when all I want is 3.5 inch bays accessible from any computer with a USB port.

how is what you described unwieldy and complicated? you can't do a hardware raid with what you described anyway... I can get a box to hold what you described just now and it would hold it nicely and organized -- not to mention, it'd not zap all the electricity to turn on the device either -- 1 drive turns on instead of TEN.

again, this has a very narrow use-case that's a little bonkers to me given what we have today. I'd still rather have 10 3.5" drives in a machine that I can manage and utilize an SAS controller...

something tells me that you can't even really micromanage this thing where you'd have 1 set of 3 drives being RAID 0, another 3 independent, and then another 4 drive RAID 0 either.

another thing I can pick on this is how the drive bays are easy to open and can lock. That's great. but then right next to each bay is a power button... so the accidental "oops I popped out a drive I didn't want to pop out" is solved, but then what if you hit a power button on one of these bays?

don't get me wrong, 1999 me thinks this thing is cool - 2024 me thinks this has a limited usage scope - 2025 me says this is basically obsolete _unless_ I have some stock of 3.5" drives sitting in the basement because I have a team of 4k video editors that need a scratch space to process large videos quickly with their USB 3.2 laptop and want to share that

in any case, there's a plethora of better ways to utilize 10 3.5" drives than what this is (for the price it's going for)

Are.....are you serious? If you just throw 10 external enclosures in a box, they're gonna cook each other. And then there's routing all the cables. Not to mention how much vibration 10 drives running simultaneously can make.

It feels like you're just looking for stuff to complain about now. I already said I was gonna do software RAID, and you can do that with one 10 bay enclosure or ten single bay enclosures. It doesn't have to be complicated.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-...75ba11f9f2 [microsoft.com]

what is it that you're really looking to do with this thing... it sounded like you are content with having 10 independent drives spinning away in this thing being independent and not being an array at one point (at least that's what I thought...)

you need to plug this thing into a machine when you use it, so what's the difference that you take one drive out of a box to plug in vs all 10 at once...

Meh, I personally would rather spend a bit more and get way more functionality with an old dell server machine.

It's a tremendous risk to drop 10 drives in such a thing. If you seriously need so many drive bays, search for a used server on Craigslist, you will find very nice ones much cheaper than this.

I run an 8-bay mediasonic USB setup on an old mac mini running ubuntu. Drives are setup using ZFS.

It makes a killer Plex server

This is 10+ years too late for my need. Shame this wasn't a thing when I was first building raids for a home nas.

You could also just get 10 single drive USB enclosures for 20 bucks each and a 10 port USB hub for like 40 bucks. That would be functionally identical for 240 bucks. The issue is that's unwieldy and complicated. Just like building a 10 bay NAS when all I want is 3.5 inch bays accessible from any computer with a USB port.