I am testing out 3 drives with unRAID and 5.02b, and I am in the process of copying from external source in order to populate at least 60% of the 2 drives.

From reading, I have not assigned the parity drive yet to make copying faster.

 

First thing I tried to connect via USB was a Vantec Nexstar MX dual HDD enclosure (without the eSata option).

With 2 HDDs inside, 1 was not recognized and the other I was able to mount and copy from it to my unRAID share.

Is this a driver problem or port-multiplier issue?

 

I then tried to connect a Vantec Nexstar HDD Dock which has eSata and USB.  I connected via eSata externally, which is internally connected to port 4 on the 4-port SATA controller.

Tried a reboot but it complained about "ata4: srst failed errno 16".

 

I then tried via USB with a 500 GB HDD, but HDD started to click -- even though Win-XP has no problem with it (even chkdsk is ok).

Putting it back into a different HDD dock for Win-XP worked fine for this drive.

 

I then tried a WD EARS1.5 TB Green drive with the Vantec HDD Dock via USB, and I could mount it.  I started copying files but after 5 minutes it died with input/output access errors. The mount point was lost.

FYI, not sure if you knew about the jumpers required on the EARS drives or not as they're not included with the drives:

 

Do I need to worry about the Green drives, even if they were properly formatted on a Windows 7 system?

Any other reason for the HDD Dock problems I ran into?

 

 

Does anyone use these external USB/eSata enclosures, and can answer my questions in OP?

 

 

Sorry, I have no experience with those enclosures.

I have an older dock like the white one posted and the problem I always had it would not support 1.5TB drives so every time I tried to use it I couldn't get any of my windows machines to see it. Of course at the time I wasn't running unRAID so I couldn't test it either.

 

I was reading that some of the docks that had two bays actually relied on the motherboard of the machine it was plugging into to support multipliers. Meaning if you used both drive bays it would normally only see one, which I hate to say it is a really bad thing since you would assume it would come with the ability to see both using Esata.

 

As for the jumper required running Fat or NFTS as an external drive has me wondering too.