What's the largest size USB enclosure that I can use to backup a NAS?

[convergent]

I have a new QNAP TS-659 and one of the things I have been trying to work out is a good "hands off" backup strategy for it. I had originally assumed I'd use the 5 USB ports to attach a few USB drives for now and setup backup jobs to take care of it. Then I discovered QNAP will only let you setup a single backup job to external USB drives. Further fiddling led me to using remote replication (rsync) internally and I was then able to backup to multiple drives with multiple jobs. I though I was all set until I discovered that QNAP has a somewhat un-useful way of defining the external USB drives... the first one it sees is USBDrive1, next is USBDrive2, etc. Well on my first reboot, it changed the drive identities on me and all my backup jobs, had I not noticed, would have gone to the wrong drives and overloaded them... thus completely breaking my backups. So now I'm thinking that the cheapest and easiest way to handle backup would be to get a cheap 4 bay USB enclosure that I can run as one giant JBOD volume. The first couple that I've found limit a spanned volume to 2TB, however, so that is kind of useless since I can get 2TB in a single drive. Does anyone know of an inexpensive, quiet, simple USB enclosure that I can use for this purpose. Ultimately, I'd like to slap 4 x 2TB drives in it and have one big 8TB volume show up attached to my NAS.

 

[zurge]

Did you try going to newegg.com or another equivalent website and search for a 8TB hard drive? I know LaCie makes a 8TB enclosure that costs around $1400.

I'm not sure how much you are looking to spend but in order to get 8TB of storage you are gonna have to spend a fair amount of money.

Also, make sure you check with Qnap to see how large of a drive they support on a single USB port.

 

[Lalato]

Something like this?

http://www.startech.com/item/SAT354...-Multi-Bay-External-Hard-Drive-Enclosure.aspx

 

[thiggins]

If you're going for a multi-drive enclosure, go with eSATA. Your backups will be much faster.

Look at Sans Digital TowerStor and TowerRAID.

 

[Lalato]

By the way I saw this from a user on the QNAP forums...

QNAP NASes do not support Port Multipiers. so if you by a 4 disk external enclosure and connect it to the QNAP you will only see the first disk of you external drive, if the enclosure is detected correctly.
if you want to use RAID for multiple external drives then the RAID has to be managed by the external enclosure in a way that all external disk appear as one big SATA disk. then you might have a chance to get it working.

for example: one user reported a 4TB two disk RAID0 WD MyBook disk working corectly with the latest firmware. the RAID 0 is handled by the WD enclosure and both disks apear as one single 4TB disk.