Man this is great. Most of the other "cheap NAS" tutorials I've seen seem to think that cheap means $500 or more. Your videos are always more budget friendly.
@@Ryuuken24 NAS only good for buisness, for home use just use cloud service provider its safer you wont loose your data, in other hand NAS if you still nee to back up it to another cloud service provider to assure you're data is safe, so what the use of NAS?
Agreed! I have just done the same with my Microserver. I lashed out (really lashed out!) on 4 x 2TB Ironwolf drives. Just getting my head around FreeNAS again.
I'd previously been using a Mac mini with external firewire storage, but had issues with PSUs failing which potentially could take the data with it. After tracking down the correct replacements at £40 each, the idea didn't appeal much. The Microserver was on offer with cash back, so ended up costing £100. The four 1TB drives came out the external boxes and went in the Microserver and were set up a fault tolerant ZFS. They got upgraded for larger drives about 2 years later. One of those developed issues, FreeNAS sent a notification and continued running with degraded performance. Pulled the drive, got it swapped under warranty and it rebuilt on the new drive within a day. No data loss. The bit that appeals is that the whole thing is portable. Config is backed up. If the Microserver develops a fault, then transfer the drives over to another PC, install FreeNAS and restore the config. No proprietary PSUs or drive controller boards in an external device that could take your data with it. Performance is good, happily saturates a gigabit connection.
John Roberts But those Microservers are super old. No USB 3.0. Probably not even Gigabit ethernet. Only 4 bays instead of five. And might not support 4tb and up drives... Details please?
@@lisov4575: As it happens my install is not going well. With older kit I normally put "like age with like age". The disk array keeps stalling :( The HDD LED lights up permanently but nothing is really happening. I'm dropping to two drives and performing another test...Patience is required with these thingsI also need to prove that one of the new drives isn't bad..
I wonder how good the enclosure does 'protecting' the drives. Vibrations can kill a hard drive, especially so in a RAID array. And by the looks of it, the drives are not supported in any way other than the sata and power ports, and that the drive can wobble inside the bay as there is some considerable amount of slack (not a tight fit) when the drive is inserted.
3:46 when you create storage pool, you got warning of losing existing data. so it has to be empty drive, otherwise you lose your existing files, right? Thank you!
You get what you paid for.Mostly made of plastic. The power button came off when I pushed it. The fan is very loud,louder than my old desktop. Had this for a while, but only run it a total of about a week's time. I'm afraid to leave it on for 24hrs ,for a longer period of time for it might burn itself... . it gets pretty hot also . . Might just use it for backups and only turn it on when I need to access the files.
This was excellent! I’m a huge fan of that 5 bay ORICO enclosure. That brand has served my needs well in the past. I love the ability to RAID in Widows 10. Thanks for another informative upload👍🏾🌝.
If you are okay with having the jmicron chipset this is fine. My data is so important I went with Qnap solutions but that's not exactly budget friendly.
In my case, using it with 2 x 6TB HD and 2 x 1TB HD, this thing gets extremely hot, the HDs burn when touch and slow down extremely, I need to rise it up and open the cover, using only 2 drives each time, because it does not suck enough air and the ventilation is really bad.....
Great Info! It's very practical way to keep integrity of our HDD data. General people are ignorant of Win's Storage Management section. Thank you for your introduction.
I have a Vantec NexStar HX4 with both USB 3.0 and eSATA and I can tell you that eSATA is the way to go. It is a pain in the a-- to switch drives in it and the fan is loud. I've also dealt with enclosures that use trays that you have to remove from one drive and put them in the other, usually with custom screws that if you lose you're...screwed (HAHA). I love how you can switch the drives around in this ORICO by just dropping them in. If they have an eSATA model, I'd go that route for sure.
I did look into eSATA with another product last year, the issue I had was that only the first drive would show up, not the other ones. Some driver issue or feature not supported. And yea, not much these days has eSATA it seems.
@@philscomputerlab When it comes to multiple drive enclosures, you most likely need a RAID card. On boot-up, you should see the RAID BIOS load up and display all the drives attached. If it is an eSATA port on a motherboard, typically they are not RAID capable and/or cannot see all the drives. The Nexstar was connected to a eSATA raid controller card. The card's BIOS has the option of being flashed in raid mode or non-raid mode. I use non-raid mode and use the OS to handle the drive configuration. I only use the Nexstar as a multi-drive box, no raid involved.
I think I am going to do an offline backup for parity with just regular external drives. I likely will just drop some small spare drives in it at first. I just want to test out a NAS. I think this is a good entry-level to see if it works for me.
What if you were to make your own NAS with this, but with a Raspberry Pi 4.0 with the 4 GB of RAM, maybe put if you can set it up one of the drives with a 2.5 inch SSD as a cache drive.
Normally I would opt for NAS which I did but heck Im liking this. Pure genius stuff. Why havent I thought of this myself when dashing out good sum for nas and a couple of drives lol
I only just came across these Orico boxes and thought they were a great idea, although there wasn't a lot of information about how they actually worked. I just wanted to throw a few HDD in there as a cheap and secondary backup for my NAS using smaller older drives. I never even thought about adding a cheap SFF computer as a controller and using them as an actual NAS! Great idea.
I'm wondering something. If this is setup as parity ("Raid 5" I guess) in windows, what happens if you tried plugging the enclosure into a different Windows PC? Is Windows 10/11 now bright enough to recognise that all the drives that just attached were set up as a raid array? Does Windows create a config file on a kind of master boot sector of the drives so other windows 10/11 installs can configure the existing array when it's plugged in? Or is the user just presented with the "Unformatted drives" message? What I'm getting at is, if you needed to reinstall windows on the PC, does this mean that your backup data is suddenly gone due to windows not picking up on the "USB hard drives" having a pre existing array on them?
Since you're already relying on a used computer (the thin client), why not get a HP Microserver? I bought my Gen7 (that's the first one, actually) Microserver N40L (or maybe even just an N36L, I can't recall) for 70 euros including 8 GB of RAM, and a single 500GB disk, which I pulled out, and installed two 2TB and two 3TB drives. For OS I'm using Synology DSM with the Xpenology loader, but FreeNAS or Windows could be an option as well. (it came with a license for Windows Home Server 2011, which is essentially a dumbed down Server 2008 R2). The drives are in two RAID 1 (mirror) configurations, so I have a 3TB and a 2TB share. Works just fine :)
Because I have a TON of Thin Clients already :) I'm not sure what local prices are, but sounds interesting for sure. What I show in the video can indeed be applied to all sorts of systems.
Sure, I just pointed out that one can get a full computer for the price of the 5 bay enclosure. The advantage is the direct SATA connection to each drive. My previous NAS was a Fujitsu Esprimo E5730 with a Pentium E5300, which I got off eBay for 50€ (plus 20€ shipping), although with no RAM or hard drive. Despite being a desktop case, I could fit in 4 3,5" drives (two factory positions, one in the floppy drive bay, and one in the 5,25" bay). The only thing is that it complains for a missing keyboard on bootup, and there's no setting for that in the BIOS. On the other hand it was much more silent than the HP Microserver. I could barely hear it across a 3x4m room.
lucky you to get an hp gen7 for that price dude, I suggest also to try openmiediavault which is Debian based, you can do pretty much everything once you get docker up and running, including deploying your personal gitlab repo, Plex server, ownclound with document editing and so on and so forth (is not that easy but feasible)
@@alasuisi I could do it, but I don't have the need for it. Although I could configure Debian or Ubuntu from scratch to be a quite usable NAS, I don't want to do it, if I don't have to. DSM gave me a really good interface with plenty of options and settings and I'm totally happy with it.
AttilaSVK sure that also is a nice route that I’ve still to investigste, I was just worried about potential instability down the road since is not exactly officially supported, anyway I had some expenses recently so my project is still on hold (damn 6tb drives are not cheap at all)
WARNING: I've purchased the this 5-Drive Orico and ThinClient based on this video. My goal was to use FreeNAS. Problem: FreeNAS does not play nicely with 5 drives over one USB3 connection and may not even see the additional drives. The override is to do tricky commandline overrides that will get overwritten every time you update FreeNAS, so I don't recommend it. I ended up using an old computer case instead and direct SATA connections. If you are using windows to setup your RAID, it may work (I haven't tried), but FreeNAS isn't so happy with USB based multi-connections (In my experience).
Its not a nas tho. Its just a fancy usb enclosure where you can set raid. Usb is not reliable enough for a nas as the connection will drop out eventually
1:47 question about that product. does it read already formatted raid5 hdd? i am looking for something to connect my hdd to pc without using up sata data and power cables.
Now this might be a dumb question. But isn't putting a magnet near a Hard Drive a bad idea & if so why would they make the lid magnetic? lol I am sure it is safe for some reason like the magnets are only strong enough to hold the lid on but not hurt the drives.
Yeah i did not write that in my comment, but at work most PC's during CRT days had stong speakers in magents on the screen or next to them Goodle some of PC XT days, there is a story about some business buy a spreadsheet or word processor of 2 or 3 5.25 floppies, they cantch the subway back to work and try and instll and have iissues, tech support ocmes out and issues. They go back to the retail shop or software hosue developer, they check the disks and they are faulty, as it was 1 or 2 days old the sale they gave them a new sealed box. Next day they come back So this time, the reseller sends a staff member with them, they catch the subway and go to the office, unpack the software go to install and nothing So the IT guy gets a floppy out of a box and just writes a file to it and a few thing tomake sure the 5.25 drive is working properly in read and write , it is fine Back again the next day same problem So was it 4 or 5 sets pf faulty production ??? No the problem was fixed, when the last one was dispatched by a staff member who lived in the area and he caught a bus and walked and installed it - not a problem What was the problem ??? . . . . . . . . . It was the magnetic inference form the subway electrical system as the train is electric and used high voltage for power, it was realized after a few other customers returned goods and they to mentioned they just caught the subway back to work - they were able to reformat the floppies and copy onto them the install files and resell them Regards George
Hi! Thanks for making, testing, and sharing! This was very helpful. I had no idea about the existence of these thin client boxes. For me, that's revolutionary, fantastic! And as for the RAID case, I've had only very positive experience with Orico products I've owned previously. Have a great day!
I did something similar with another 5 bay USB enclosure: TerraMaster D5-300C, which I am running it in JBOD mode. My thin client is an 6th gen Intel NUC that I got on clearance and it runs great with Unraid!
Probably the cheapest(and best) solution - Raspberry Pi 4 (2gb is FAR more than enough), usb3 hub with external power supply and usb3 to sata3 connectors. Software for Raspberry Pi - OpenMediaVault. I found this on raspberrypi forum. You can google it with "WD My Cloud 3TB (the software was so bad)" (google it with " )
Nice, I got 8 drives in my server and it's a pain in the ass to work on if I gotta swap a drive out, but I am not sure if I would wanna take that performance hit since I use parity on storage spaces. Thanks for the overview!
Can I use this as just a external hard drive? I have five, and it's annoying to have five external hard drives standing around. I don't need it as a nas, I just use them as backups.
plan to make my own hard drive box, its only JBOD not RAID but what i hate about cheaper cases that even they include a fan the routing for air is like 5% the rest 95% is blocked, so will build mine using old computer rack with sliding trays, because hdd's no matter where they are - they need airflow over them if they are working, thus prolonging the lifespan greatly
personally I use openmediaserver as my NAS server.. it is on debian and you can install tons of plugins like torrent downloader, plex server, jdownloader, samba share etc.. It has a web client and it is very easy to use.
You could build yourself a multiple HDD dock or box for about $30 (if you already got an old PSU laying around), you would just software RAID it if you want, probably won't be the fastest thing around either but its cheap, get yourself a PCIe to USB 3 Riser and a good old PCIe Sata Port Multiplier... if you are the crafty type, build a cool little box with fans and what not, and voila.
So the Raid is setup with Windows. What if I need to reinstall Windows one day? What, if I want to take the Enclosure to another PC. Will this damage the Raid on the external Drive?
does the native storage pool function on windows as shown offer a RAID 6 configuration? in the video you chose RAID 5 and i think 2 way refers to RAID 1 but i am unsure about 3 way.
nice video, ty. This gives me another idea; instead of attaching this to a thin client, i can attach it to my main pc and share the volume from there, if needed. ty ;)
Hi I'm just wondering if you could do a video for the Orico 5 bay 6558Us3-C. I'm having issues install it. Do I have to use only new hard drives when starting.
I think one's main pc should have a motherboard with raid support and 6-10 sata drives, and a case with good 3.5" cooling. The CPU should be able to enter into a raid-sleep mode when not using the pc for normal use, allowing other devices to stream from the drives if required.
Is this 'storage pool' thing in Windows the same as RAID? Or is there a difference? 🤔 One is hardware and one software or something, maybe? Does one have advantages over the other?
I did the same experiment with spare parts and common desktop hard drives, suffice to say the reliability was really poor and damaged 6 hard drives before calling it quits, still this is something you can with do with stuff you have lying around but for any serious case it's worth to invest in a proper NAS device and drives ( see IronWolf or WD Red ).
all depends on what u want for a nas. if just storage, this is a cheap alternative. If u want more features, Qnap/Synology nas offers a lot more features with their apps. I believe u are paying more for this apps & features rather than the hardware.
That bay functions properly with 4TB drives?! Weird I could only find ones compatible with up to 3TB. But this one still isn't enough. Because I'd need something that can handle 12TB drives...so only a custom server would do 😕
The problems with "cheap" NAS or RAID boxes is that they often die, typically due to a cheap powersupply (PSU)... then where do you plug in 5 working drives? Hopefully it is backed up - then it could take a few days to restore the 8TB of data for the array... maybe you are a bit faster on a 10g network (wired of course). Two 14TB or 10TB drives - mirror setup - or well backed up (3 drives for RAID5) are not a bad option.... even SoftRAID is fairly efficient on a modern Mac with 10g networking.
Windows Storage Spaces is also a really viable solution. In fact it is what I prefer anymore TBH. With ReFS it does constant file verification so hopefully this will prevent bitrot. And I've definitely seen bitrot in a lot of my older data and it is definitely a problem with long term storage solutions outside of maybe tape and optical media.
I bought one of these, but the single bay version. Everytime a drive goes into powersaving mode, the only way to get it to spin back up is to restart via the hardware switch on the rear. Was wondering if the multibay version had the same problem?
Nothing of that sort! I've got this setup now with 2x 2TB in mirrored RAID, 1x 8TB stand alone and 2x 2TB stand alone and it works great. It seems that when I turn on another PC on the network, the NAS box wakes up, so that works great for me.
@@philscomputerlab Good to know, thanks Phil! For anyone wondering, the model I had issues with was the ORICO 7618US3. Though I'm pretty sure the problems I had were a one off as the build quality is really quite good.
Now that you have had the enclosure for 2 years how did it hold up? There are several amazon reviews where it ending up corrupting data and am curious as to how it did for you.
Why can't you just get five usb to SATA adapters off Amazon? Is there a difference is it necessary to pay $130 for a budget Nas box, when you could build a $100 computer with five drives in it?
Yea you can get a USB Hub and 5x USB to SATA Adapters. But you'll also need 5x PSUs then, so it can get a bit messy, but maybe a bit cheaper. And yes, you can just get a standard PC with internal drives. So there are lots of ways of doing it and saving money :D
Or buy a used computer with space for plenty of hard drives. I bet you could even get a new computer for under $200, of course I would use a Celeron or one of those Dule core Ryzen with 4gb ram and one of those $40 cases but you might need to go more expensive than if the case doesn't support 5 drives
The enclosure isn't a RAID 5 controller and just shows up over the USB 3 connector as 5 separate drives? I'm looking for something basic to plug into my router that show up as one external USB HDD, which is what I have connect to it now. I just want much more capacity than what one physical drive can offer and the one-drive-redundancy of RAID 5 would be nice.
@@philscomputerlab I found one under the same brand. Looks like the ORICO 9558RU3 has a built-in RAID 5 controller with USB 3 external connectivity. I was getting a bit lost looking at Synology options that had built-in servers for quite a bit more when just the basic server in my router seems to work well enough. Take care and thanks for the video. Even if it wasn't quite what I was looking for, it helped point me in the right direction.
@@philscomputerlab Yeah, but I'm fine with something more basic. I mostly just want capacity for redundancy in multiple computer backups and file sharing. My router can function as a very simple NAS server with storage connected to it directly via USB 3, where I have a 2TB external HDD currently, so basically I'm just looking for a very large capacity external HDD. LOL Cheers. :)
can you use this in JBOD. ? RAID for me is a waste of space/// i do not keep large pools of data on hardrives for any period of time so i am not worried about drive failure
I just purchased a HP Elite 8300 and I'm going to put a GTX 1050 TI in it and try to get either a raid card or that USB 3 DAS (Not NAS) since it really isnt a NAS. and run Storage Spaces for games / Plex for redundancy.
Why didn´t you show the noise level of the fan and HDDs in this case ? But okay, I won´t buy it anyway because all HDDs will switch on at power on... I like respective switches for each drive because of HDD lifelength. Therefore it´s not the best when using as a 5 bay "docking station".
It would be interesting to see if there's any difference with 3 drives in the 5 bay model on one port, and a couple in a 2 bay model(assuming banggood would be willing to bung one your way) on the other, rather than having the lot on one port.
I linked some of the lower models with fewer bays in the video description. I don't think there are performance differences, but if you access 5 drives, it might be slower than if you access all 2 drives in a 2 bay enclosure?
Very helpful video! I was thinking about using this enclosure and putting in my already configured 3x3TB Windows Storage Space. The passthrough of the HDDs to the OS seems to work fine, so I'll give it shot. Now I can finally upgrade my big chunky PC case to something quieter and more beautiful looking.
Hi great videos, I'm considering to buy one of these. Does this model really supports RAID? I checked on their website, it doesn't say anything about RAID on DS500U3.
NOTE: Parity using the Windows storage spaces GUI only ever sets up three column RAID-5, and just shifts the three columns around the five disks. This can be corrected using the command-line interface, but is pretty badly documented, and not ideal for beginners. The result of this is that performance sucks with more than three drives, as you're not getting any benefit in terms of speed from the one or two extra drives that might be in this enclosure, as they remain idle when a particular segment of data is being read/written.
@@electrocat9 at 1:30, look at how loose the drives are in the bay. Hard drives vibrate when they operate, thus being loose can cause problems with the dead head not reading properly, thus causing read errors.
@@davidg4512 I get your point, I have on usb2 and esata enc and i remember the same thing i was wondering that time... and you think it would be better ribbon connectors attached to every HDD?
I don't like ABS case, in fact I hate plastic case where heat needs to be dissipated, that case should be something like Copper radiator. A HDD works reliably when it maintains as low as possible it's temperature.
I couldn't do that slow... I recently took all my back ups on to a DAS, they were on a range of disks and it took almost a month to do. My new DAS runs about 8gbs, but I run strips (raid o) and have duplicate so it's manually mirrored, but that's no bother as the DAS is attached to a server and VM so it can do all the work itself. But I have a alt backup procedure, with a old HP microserver which I hacked, that is probably cheaper, £65. It has five bays. I have a HDD mirror to off load and then 3 backup drives, I get around 120mbs when working with them and around 340 on the strip. I seldom run that server to the DAS, due to the slower connection and run on the 10gbe to the server's DAS as a SAN. So I get "add storage" and I get "backup"
HP T610 - AMD Dual-Core T56N APU with Radeon HD 6320 Graphics (1.65 GHz, 1MB L2 cache), 4GB Flash. Should be fine for a stripped down purpose-built NAS distro.
@@philscomputerlab i run Synology on top of Proxmox, i wonder if the proxmox / Linux can detect each drive as separate disk even tho its using single cable like in windows.
Videos like this are why you don't even need instruction manuals anymore. Thanks for helping me get mine setup.
Man this is great. Most of the other "cheap NAS" tutorials I've seen seem to think that cheap means $500 or more. Your videos are always more budget friendly.
Thanks Sam!
in Australia everything is more expensive than the US... you have to be smarter :D
If you're paying less than 500 dollars for a real NAS setup you're burning money, and deserve to lose all your family photos and videos.
@@Ryuuken24 NAS only good for buisness, for home use just use cloud service provider its safer you wont loose your data, in other hand NAS if you still nee to back up it to another cloud service provider to assure you're data is safe, so what the use of NAS?
@Mr Guru lol same here. I got 2x8 TB of DIY nas storage for just that lmao movies/tvshows
HP MicroServer - job done.
Low TDP AMD CPU, and 4 proper drive bays.
Bought one 5 years ago installed FreeNAS onto a USB key. It's not missed a beat.
I'll have to look into that, a few have commented :)
Agreed! I have just done the same with my Microserver. I lashed out (really lashed out!) on 4 x 2TB Ironwolf drives. Just getting my head around FreeNAS again.
I'd previously been using a Mac mini with external firewire storage, but had issues with PSUs failing which potentially could take the data with it. After tracking down the correct replacements at £40 each, the idea didn't appeal much.
The Microserver was on offer with cash back, so ended up costing £100. The four 1TB drives came out the external boxes and went in the Microserver and were set up a fault tolerant ZFS. They got upgraded for larger drives about 2 years later. One of those developed issues, FreeNAS sent a notification and continued running with degraded performance. Pulled the drive, got it swapped under warranty and it rebuilt on the new drive within a day. No data loss.
The bit that appeals is that the whole thing is portable. Config is backed up. If the Microserver develops a fault, then transfer the drives over to another PC, install FreeNAS and restore the config. No proprietary PSUs or drive controller boards in an external device that could take your data with it.
Performance is good, happily saturates a gigabit connection.
John Roberts But those Microservers are super old. No USB 3.0. Probably not even Gigabit ethernet. Only 4 bays instead of five. And might not support 4tb and up drives... Details please?
@@lisov4575: As it happens my install is not going well. With older kit I normally put "like age with like age". The disk array keeps stalling :( The HDD LED lights up permanently but nothing is really happening. I'm dropping to two drives and performing another test...Patience is required with these thingsI also need to prove that one of the new drives isn't bad..
I wonder how good the enclosure does 'protecting' the drives. Vibrations can kill a hard drive, especially so in a RAID array. And by the looks of it, the drives are not supported in any way other than the sata and power ports, and that the drive can wobble inside the bay as there is some considerable amount of slack (not a tight fit) when the drive is inserted.
Blah blah blah
Keep pretending to be smart.
3:46 when you create storage pool, you got warning of losing existing data. so it has to be empty drive, otherwise you lose your existing files, right? Thank you!
Yup, I didn't empty the drives before creating the pool :) You will lose data, yes.
@@philscomputerlab thanks a lot for confirm!
You get what you paid for.Mostly made of plastic. The power button came off when I pushed it. The fan is very loud,louder than my old desktop. Had this for a while, but only run it a total of about a week's time. I'm afraid to leave it on for 24hrs ,for a longer period of time for it might burn itself... . it gets pretty hot also . . Might just use it for backups and only turn it on when I need to access the files.
Isn't there a way to make them fit snug? I wouldn't want my disks to wobble like this just being maintained by their SATA/power ports
This was excellent! I’m a huge fan of that 5 bay ORICO enclosure. That brand has served my needs well in the past. I love the ability to RAID in Widows 10. Thanks for another informative upload👍🏾🌝.
If you are okay with having the jmicron chipset this is fine. My data is so important I went with Qnap solutions but that's not exactly budget friendly.
In my case, using it with 2 x 6TB HD and 2 x 1TB HD, this thing gets extremely hot, the HDs burn when touch and slow down extremely, I need to rise it up and open the cover, using only 2 drives each time, because it does not suck enough air and the ventilation is really bad.....
I use devices from ORICO and have no complains, great stuff and good prices.
Yea I bought a few other stuff from them. I have two of these transparent 2.5" drive enclosures, they work great.
Great Info! It's very practical way to keep integrity of our HDD data. General people are ignorant of Win's Storage Management section. Thank you for your introduction.
I have a Vantec NexStar HX4 with both USB 3.0 and eSATA and I can tell you that eSATA is the way to go. It is a pain in the a-- to switch drives in it and the fan is loud. I've also dealt with enclosures that use trays that you have to remove from one drive and put them in the other, usually with custom screws that if you lose you're...screwed (HAHA). I love how you can switch the drives around in this ORICO by just dropping them in. If they have an eSATA model, I'd go that route for sure.
I did look into eSATA with another product last year, the issue I had was that only the first drive would show up, not the other ones. Some driver issue or feature not supported. And yea, not much these days has eSATA it seems.
@@philscomputerlab When it comes to multiple drive enclosures, you most likely need a RAID card. On boot-up, you should see the RAID BIOS load up and display all the drives attached. If it is an eSATA port on a motherboard, typically they are not RAID capable and/or cannot see all the drives. The Nexstar was connected to a eSATA raid controller card. The card's BIOS has the option of being flashed in raid mode or non-raid mode. I use non-raid mode and use the OS to handle the drive configuration. I only use the Nexstar as a multi-drive box, no raid involved.
I was just looking at building a NAS last night and you put out this video! Get out of my head! Lol
I think I am going to do an offline backup for parity with just regular external drives. I likely will just drop some small spare drives in it at first. I just want to test out a NAS. I think this is a good entry-level to see if it works for me.
I like the old model horizontal disc and grill door
One thing i don't like on it is the glossy plastic. But otherwise it seems to be good enclosure for NAS. Great video
What if you were to make your own NAS with this, but with a Raspberry Pi 4.0 with the 4 GB of RAM, maybe put if you can set it up one of the drives with a 2.5 inch SSD as a cache drive.
.
Normally I would opt for NAS which I did but heck Im liking this. Pure genius stuff. Why havent I thought of this myself when dashing out good sum for nas and a couple of drives lol
I use in my home sometining similary but i use OpenmediaVault OS very easy to use and install to create a Nas system, great video grestings from Chile
I only just came across these Orico boxes and thought they were a great idea, although there wasn't a lot of information about how they actually worked. I just wanted to throw a few HDD in there as a cheap and secondary backup for my NAS using smaller older drives. I never even thought about adding a cheap SFF computer as a controller and using them as an actual NAS! Great idea.
Great cheap storage.Thanks Phil
Definitely would want to be able to disable fan. Also non-standard power adapter is a non-starter. Ideally would prefer SSDs.
I'm wondering something. If this is setup as parity ("Raid 5" I guess) in windows, what happens if you tried plugging the enclosure into a different Windows PC? Is Windows 10/11 now bright enough to recognise that all the drives that just attached were set up as a raid array?
Does Windows create a config file on a kind of master boot sector of the drives so other windows 10/11 installs can configure the existing array when it's plugged in? Or is the user just presented with the "Unformatted drives" message?
What I'm getting at is, if you needed to reinstall windows on the PC, does this mean that your backup data is suddenly gone due to windows not picking up on the "USB hard drives" having a pre existing array on them?
It recognises the array, tested in Windows 10 :)
Since you're already relying on a used computer (the thin client), why not get a HP Microserver? I bought my Gen7 (that's the first one, actually) Microserver N40L (or maybe even just an N36L, I can't recall) for 70 euros including 8 GB of RAM, and a single 500GB disk, which I pulled out, and installed two 2TB and two 3TB drives. For OS I'm using Synology DSM with the Xpenology loader, but FreeNAS or Windows could be an option as well. (it came with a license for Windows Home Server 2011, which is essentially a dumbed down Server 2008 R2). The drives are in two RAID 1 (mirror) configurations, so I have a 3TB and a 2TB share. Works just fine :)
Because I have a TON of Thin Clients already :) I'm not sure what local prices are, but sounds interesting for sure. What I show in the video can indeed be applied to all sorts of systems.
Sure, I just pointed out that one can get a full computer for the price of the 5 bay enclosure. The advantage is the direct SATA connection to each drive.
My previous NAS was a Fujitsu Esprimo E5730 with a Pentium E5300, which I got off eBay for 50€ (plus 20€ shipping), although with no RAM or hard drive. Despite being a desktop case, I could fit in 4 3,5" drives (two factory positions, one in the floppy drive bay, and one in the 5,25" bay). The only thing is that it complains for a missing keyboard on bootup, and there's no setting for that in the BIOS. On the other hand it was much more silent than the HP Microserver. I could barely hear it across a 3x4m room.
lucky you to get an hp gen7 for that price dude, I suggest also to try openmiediavault which is Debian based, you can do pretty much everything once you get docker up and running, including deploying your personal gitlab repo, Plex server, ownclound with document editing and so on and so forth (is not that easy but feasible)
@@alasuisi I could do it, but I don't have the need for it. Although I could configure Debian or Ubuntu from scratch to be a quite usable NAS, I don't want to do it, if I don't have to. DSM gave me a really good interface with plenty of options and settings and I'm totally happy with it.
AttilaSVK sure that also is a nice route that I’ve still to investigste, I was just worried about potential instability down the road since is not exactly officially supported, anyway I had some expenses recently so my project is still on hold (damn 6tb drives are not cheap at all)
would have been nice to see your file transfer speeds.
WARNING: I've purchased the this 5-Drive Orico and ThinClient based on this video. My goal was to use FreeNAS. Problem: FreeNAS does not play nicely with 5 drives over one USB3 connection and may not even see the additional drives. The override is to do tricky commandline overrides that will get overwritten every time you update FreeNAS, so I don't recommend it.
I ended up using an old computer case instead and direct SATA connections.
If you are using windows to setup your RAID, it may work (I haven't tried), but FreeNAS isn't so happy with USB based multi-connections (In my experience).
Thanks for the heads up!
PhilsComputerLab here to help! Thx for the video though, it did teach me about FreeNAS which turns out to be awesome.
Its not a nas tho. Its just a fancy usb enclosure where you can set raid. Usb is not reliable enough for a nas as the connection will drop out eventually
1:47 question about that product.
does it read already formatted raid5 hdd? i am looking for something to connect my hdd to pc without using up sata data and power cables.
Well with RAID 5, with what device was the RAID5 created? You will need the exact same device to access the data.
Now this might be a dumb question. But isn't putting a magnet near a Hard Drive a bad idea & if so why would they make the lid magnetic? lol I am sure it is safe for some reason like the magnets are only strong enough to hold the lid on but not hurt the drives.
Yea good point, didn't think of that to be honest. The magnets are not strong at all, just so that the lid doesn't fly off I guess :)
Inverse square law with what would already be tiny magnets. Takes a pretty substantial magnet to damage a hard drive
Yeah i did not write that in my comment, but at work most PC's during CRT days had stong speakers in magents on the screen or next to them
Goodle some of PC XT days, there is a story about some business buy a spreadsheet or word processor of 2 or 3 5.25 floppies, they cantch the subway back to work and try and instll and have iissues, tech support ocmes out and issues.
They go back to the retail shop or software hosue developer, they check the disks and they are faulty, as it was 1 or 2 days old the sale they gave them a new sealed box.
Next day they come back
So this time, the reseller sends a staff member with them, they catch the subway and go to the office, unpack the software go to install and nothing
So the IT guy gets a floppy out of a box and just writes a file to it and a few thing tomake sure the 5.25 drive is working properly in read and write , it is fine
Back again the next day same problem
So was it 4 or 5 sets pf faulty production ???
No the problem was fixed, when the last one was dispatched by a staff member who lived in the area and he caught a bus and walked and installed it - not a problem
What was the problem ???
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
It was the magnetic inference form the subway electrical system as the train is electric and used high voltage for power, it was realized after a few other customers returned goods and they to mentioned they just caught the subway back to work - they were able to reformat the floppies and copy onto them the install files and resell them
Regards
George
HaHa funny you do know that Hard Drive have magnet in them
lol take a strong magnet & hold it up to your hard drive & see what happens
So if they bay is connected to the PC, it will actually show up all 5 drives separately, instead of one USB drive.
Yes!
That is quite a budget nas solution. Well done!!!
I have this enclosure and the max read write speed is 400mb/s. Not quite SSD speed but pretty close compared to other solutions
That's pretty solid speeds!
What if I put it in a different computer? Will my RAID configuration remain same or will be changed?
Hi! Thanks for making, testing, and sharing! This was very helpful. I had no idea about the existence of these thin client boxes. For me, that's revolutionary, fantastic! And as for the RAID case, I've had only very positive experience with Orico products I've owned previously. Have a great day!
Truenas Core (FreeNAS update) only shows 1 drive in the Orico case...what could be wrong??
Could this run under control of a SBC? Something like the Orange Pi 3? In that case it could be a very lower power and cheap system.
I'm curious about the longterm effect of running standard hard drives in an enclosure that uses an apparently strong magnet to keep the lid on it.
It's really not a strong magnet though.
Hey man! I'm about to get this exact model for this month. How is it going so far after 4 years?
I've since sold it but it had been working fine while I had it! I've also reviewed other Orico products and they worked great!
Hi you explained about parity and mirror, can you create a video which helps the parity and mirror concept
I did something similar with another 5 bay USB enclosure: TerraMaster D5-300C, which I am running it in JBOD mode. My thin client is an 6th gen Intel NUC that I got on clearance and it runs great with Unraid!
Is you’re sever still up and running? Any issues be hunting for a decent server
Could you use a raspberry pi instead of the PC?
This is way better than buying a Synology. Like way way better.
Will this also work as 5 independent drives?
What if the Pc fails? How do I recover the data?
can i use this with my desktop i have setup for my security cameras?
i would put those hard drives horizontal with a FAN. putting them in this config will cook the hard drives! been there done that!
Excellent, exactly what I was thinking of doing
did you install FreeNAS OS to the computer and configure remotely?
Probably the cheapest(and best) solution - Raspberry Pi 4 (2gb is FAR more than enough), usb3 hub with external power supply and usb3 to sata3 connectors. Software for Raspberry Pi - OpenMediaVault.
I found this on raspberrypi forum. You can google it with "WD My Cloud 3TB (the software was so bad)" (google it with " )
Wow!
So, does the USB3 OUT from this 5 bay enclosure get connected to the SATA input on the existing desktop PC, by using the USB to SATA adapter?
keep in mind this enclosure has JMS561U chip it may have an issue with UASP on linux
Could I do this with a raspberry pi?
Yes, but the catch is, no
@@gp3328 haha, I actually was able to kind of get it working, it’s an awesome Low power compact nas
@@daltonprescott5430 esay
Nice, I got 8 drives in my server and it's a pain in the ass to work on if I gotta swap a drive out, but I am not sure if I would wanna take that performance hit since I use parity on storage spaces. Thanks for the overview!
Very power efficient build.
Can I use this as just a external hard drive? I have five, and it's annoying to have five external hard drives standing around. I don't need it as a nas, I just use them as backups.
Yes absolutely! That way you will just get 5 drive letters :)
@@philscomputerlab great, thank you!!
This is something I was looking for and it is cheap compared to some of the others I have been looking at.
If you already have a PC that you're comfortable running as a server, then these USB enclosures are good value.
plan to make my own hard drive box, its only JBOD not RAID but what i hate about cheaper cases that even they include a fan the routing for air is like 5% the rest 95% is blocked, so will build mine using old computer rack with sliding trays, because hdd's no matter where they are - they need airflow over them if they are working, thus prolonging the lifespan greatly
personally I use openmediaserver as my NAS server.. it is on debian and you can install tons of plugins like torrent downloader, plex server, jdownloader, samba share etc.. It has a web client and it is very easy to use.
You could build yourself a multiple HDD dock or box for about $30 (if you already got an old PSU laying around), you would just software RAID it if you want, probably won't be the fastest thing around either but its cheap, get yourself a PCIe to USB 3 Riser and a good old PCIe Sata Port Multiplier... if you are the crafty type, build a cool little box with fans and what not, and voila.
So the Raid is setup with Windows. What if I need to reinstall Windows one day? What, if I want to take the Enclosure to another PC. Will this damage the Raid on the external Drive?
does the native storage pool function on windows as shown offer a RAID 6 configuration? in the video you chose RAID 5 and i think 2 way refers to RAID 1 but i am unsure about 3 way.
nice video, ty. This gives me another idea; instead of attaching this to a thin client, i can attach it to my main pc and share the volume from there, if needed. ty ;)
This could be used with a raspberry pi instead of a thin client right?
Hi I'm just wondering if you could do a video for the Orico 5 bay 6558Us3-C.
I'm having issues install it. Do I have to use only new hard drives when starting.
I think one's main pc should have a motherboard with raid support and 6-10 sata drives, and a case with good 3.5" cooling. The CPU should be able to enter into a raid-sleep mode when not using the pc for normal use, allowing other devices to stream from the drives if required.
and it should have a PCIe add on card for world peace, a free puppy interface, and should levitate. Any other realistic additions for the wishlist?
@@annix493 best comment award 👍Can I change the puppy interface to kitten?
Is this 'storage pool' thing in Windows the same as RAID? Or is there a difference? 🤔 One is hardware and one software or something, maybe? Does one have advantages over the other?
Yea, they just try to use more friendly terminology. The mirror is RAID 1, parity Raid 5.
I did the same experiment with spare parts and common desktop hard drives, suffice to say the reliability was really poor and damaged 6 hard drives before calling it quits, still this is something you can with do with stuff you have lying around but for any serious case it's worth to invest in a proper NAS device and drives ( see IronWolf or WD Red ).
all depends on what u want for a nas. if just storage, this is a cheap alternative. If u want more features, Qnap/Synology nas offers a lot more features with their apps. I believe u are paying more for this apps & features rather than the hardware.
That bay functions properly with 4TB drives?! Weird I could only find ones compatible with up to 3TB. But this one still isn't enough. Because I'd need something that can handle 12TB drives...so only a custom server would do 😕
Well I have 1x8TB, 2x4TB and 2xwTB running in mine!
@@philscomputerlab could it do 5x8tb drive
Yes.
The problems with "cheap" NAS or RAID boxes is that they often die, typically due to a cheap powersupply (PSU)... then where do you plug in 5 working drives? Hopefully it is backed up - then it could take a few days to restore the 8TB of data for the array... maybe you are a bit faster on a 10g network (wired of course).
Two 14TB or 10TB drives - mirror setup - or well backed up (3 drives for RAID5) are not a bad option.... even SoftRAID is fairly efficient on a modern Mac with 10g networking.
Windows Storage Spaces is also a really viable solution. In fact it is what I prefer anymore TBH. With ReFS it does constant file verification so hopefully this will prevent bitrot. And I've definitely seen bitrot in a lot of my older data and it is definitely a problem with long term storage solutions outside of maybe tape and optical media.
planning to use this with my raspberry pi. terra masters etc. are too expensive for me.
Does it come with any 2.5-to-3.5 brackets, for mounting SSD rather than HDD?
I bought one of these, but the single bay version. Everytime a drive goes into powersaving mode, the only way to get it to spin back up is to restart via the hardware switch on the rear. Was wondering if the multibay version had the same problem?
Nothing of that sort! I've got this setup now with 2x 2TB in mirrored RAID, 1x 8TB stand alone and 2x 2TB stand alone and it works great. It seems that when I turn on another PC on the network, the NAS box wakes up, so that works great for me.
@@philscomputerlab Good to know, thanks Phil! For anyone wondering, the model I had issues with was the ORICO 7618US3. Though I'm pretty sure the problems I had were a one off as the build quality is really quite good.
Now that you have had the enclosure for 2 years how did it hold up? There are several amazon reviews where it ending up corrupting data and am curious as to how it did for you.
I did not use this long term, so not sure about that...
Yikes
Why can't you just get five usb to SATA adapters off Amazon?
Is there a difference is it necessary to pay $130 for a budget Nas box, when you could build a $100 computer with five drives in it?
Yea you can get a USB Hub and 5x USB to SATA Adapters. But you'll also need 5x PSUs then, so it can get a bit messy, but maybe a bit cheaper. And yes, you can just get a standard PC with internal drives. So there are lots of ways of doing it and saving money :D
Or buy a used computer with space for plenty of hard drives.
I bet you could even get a new computer for under $200, of course I would use a Celeron or one of those Dule core Ryzen with 4gb ram and one of those $40 cases but you might need to go more expensive than if the case doesn't support 5 drives
@@ryanwakebradtelle8682 The power usage for 24/7 running adds up though, and the size of the computer can be a pain.
1:59 that's usb 3.0? It kinda goofy...
The enclosure isn't a RAID 5 controller and just shows up over the USB 3 connector as 5 separate drives? I'm looking for something basic to plug into my router that show up as one external USB HDD, which is what I have connect to it now. I just want much more capacity than what one physical drive can offer and the one-drive-redundancy of RAID 5 would be nice.
That's right. The Operating System does the RAID in software.
@@philscomputerlab Thanks Phil. I'll look for other solutions. Cheers.
@@philscomputerlab I found one under the same brand. Looks like the ORICO 9558RU3 has a built-in RAID 5 controller with USB 3 external connectivity. I was getting a bit lost looking at Synology options that had built-in servers for quite a bit more when just the basic server in my router seems to work well enough. Take care and thanks for the video. Even if it wasn't quite what I was looking for, it helped point me in the right direction.
@@WR3ND Nice! I wonder about the cost. If you are serious about storage, have you considered getting a NAS? Like a DRIVESTOR 4 (AS1104T).
@@philscomputerlab Yeah, but I'm fine with something more basic. I mostly just want capacity for redundancy in multiple computer backups and file sharing. My router can function as a very simple NAS server with storage connected to it directly via USB 3, where I have a 2TB external HDD currently, so basically I'm just looking for a very large capacity external HDD. LOL Cheers. :)
3:00 I never seen this thing. It's a mini PC?
0:17 *try OpenMediaVault*
and raspberry pi :)
@@erased3 OMV has an X86 version
@@whitebeartigtig OMV has a raspberry pi version as well. I had it installed and works fine.
can you use this in JBOD. ? RAID for me is a waste of space/// i do not keep large pools of data on hardrives for any period of time so i am not worried about drive failure
I just purchased a HP Elite 8300 and I'm going to put a GTX 1050 TI in it and try to get either a raid card or that USB 3 DAS (Not NAS) since it really isnt a NAS. and run Storage Spaces for games / Plex for redundancy.
Why didn´t you show the noise level of the fan and HDDs in this case ?
But okay, I won´t buy it anyway because all HDDs will switch on at power on... I like respective switches for each drive because of HDD lifelength.
Therefore it´s not the best when using as a 5 bay "docking station".
It would be interesting to see if there's any difference with 3 drives in the 5 bay model on one port, and a couple in a 2 bay model(assuming banggood would be willing to bung one your way) on the other, rather than having the lot on one port.
I linked some of the lower models with fewer bays in the video description. I don't think there are performance differences, but if you access 5 drives, it might be slower than if you access all 2 drives in a 2 bay enclosure?
I'm just thinking it would be interesting to see the 5 drives spaced out across more USB ports, to see whether that has any effect on performance.
Can I use Raspberry PI or ODROID-H2+ with this drive enclosure?,
You want a USB 3 port on whichever machine you use. So that's a yes on the Pi 4, and a yes on the H2+ (use one of the blue USB ports).
@@GrahamAtDesk thanks
Very helpful video! I was thinking about using this enclosure and putting in my already configured 3x3TB Windows Storage Space. The passthrough of the HDDs to the OS seems to work fine, so I'll give it shot. Now I can finally upgrade my big chunky PC case to something quieter and more beautiful looking.
Have you done it ? What's the finals stats ? Are they good ?
Can you replace the fan with a quiet Noctua fan?
I guess so, but my unit is in use and no plans to open it.
How's the power consumption like? I intend to use it as 24/7 NAS, but living in Sydney you gotta watch out for the electricity bill. Thanks.
Multi pin power sockets...hate em! Always work loose. Plus once again power button at the rear. I want that on the front for a USB device.
Hi great videos, I'm considering to buy one of these. Does this model really supports RAID? I checked on their website, it doesn't say anything about RAID on DS500U3.
hi, i just want to ask, does xpenology works with this setup? thanks
NOTE: Parity using the Windows storage spaces GUI only ever sets up three column RAID-5, and just shifts the three columns around the five disks.
This can be corrected using the command-line interface, but is pretty badly documented, and not ideal for beginners.
The result of this is that performance sucks with more than three drives, as you're not getting any benefit in terms of speed from the one or two extra drives that might be in this enclosure, as they remain idle when a particular segment of data is being read/written.
Seems good but looks like it's prone to vibration since I see how loose those drives are.
What did you see please?
@@electrocat9 at 1:30, look at how loose the drives are in the bay. Hard drives vibrate when they operate, thus being loose can cause problems with the dead head not reading properly, thus causing read errors.
@@davidg4512 I get your point, I have on usb2 and esata enc and i remember the same thing i was wondering that time... and you think it would be better ribbon connectors attached to every HDD?
I don't like ABS case, in fact I hate plastic case where heat needs to be dissipated, that case should be something like Copper radiator. A HDD works reliably when it maintains as low as possible it's temperature.
This looks really great
Can you also just install up to 5 different drives and mount them individually?
Yes!
how well will this work with a Raspberry pi 4?
I couldn't do that slow...
I recently took all my back ups on to a DAS, they were on a range of disks and it took almost a month to do.
My new DAS runs about 8gbs, but I run strips (raid o) and have duplicate so it's manually mirrored, but that's no bother as the DAS is attached to a server and VM so it can do all the work itself.
But I have a alt backup procedure, with a old HP microserver which I hacked, that is probably cheaper, £65.
It has five bays.
I have a HDD mirror to off load and then 3 backup drives, I get around 120mbs when working with them and around 340 on the strip.
I seldom run that server to the DAS, due to the slower connection and run on the 10gbe to the server's DAS as a SAN.
So I get "add storage" and I get "backup"
This is what I'm exactly thinking of doing, my only question is if did you add or change the T610 storage for the OS?
Hello, what is the Ram and the HDD-Space on the Thin client to make it work?
HP T610 - AMD Dual-Core T56N APU with Radeon HD 6320 Graphics (1.65 GHz, 1MB L2 cache), 4GB Flash. Should be fine for a stripped down purpose-built NAS distro.
Do you still have this external Case in use? Are you still happy with it? How is the noise of the fan?
Great video.
I've since sold the unit, but I was happy with it. The fan is for sure not quiet, but it wasn't a deal breaker for me.
will the Raid work in PROXMOX with Synology On Top?
??
@@philscomputerlab i run Synology on top of Proxmox, i wonder if the proxmox / Linux can detect each drive as separate disk even tho its using single cable like in windows.
@@dev15652 Whatever you're saying is going straight over my head 😂
Hi Phil ,can you also set it up as non raid and just have 5 single drives
Yes, it works!
@@philscomputerlab thanks