Question 1

Is this compatible with USB 2.0?

Accepted Answer

Yes. All USB 3.0 devices are backwards compatible to USB 2.0. They will just transfer data at the slower (USB 2.0) rate, which makes running this enclosure in Raid 0 slightly pointless, but if you are running in Raid 1 still are real viable solution. I use mine with two 2 TB drives for my Xbox One to play games in Raid 0 to get faster load times and increased storage.

Question 2

will this product hold 2 8TB drives?

Accepted Answer

I don't see why it would not support 8TB hard drives.  I have one unit with 3TB hard drives in RAID1.  If it can support over a 2TB drive that means it can address over 32bits (2^32).  Therefore, it should be able to support 8TB and above.  It should also be noted that at the time of the release of this product, the largest consumer grade hard drive available was 4TB; hence stating it can support "up to" 4TB hard drives.  However, don't quote me on this as I would be sure and check with StarTech support before making your purchase.

Question 3

Can you use this without enabling raid?

Accepted Answer

Yes, no problem.  There is a 4-position mode switch in the back so that you can make two drives in the enclosure function in the following modes:  
- JBOD (just a bunch of drives, in this case, two)
- Combine (single concatenated volume)
- Mirroring (RAID 1)
- Striping (RAID 0)

Question 4

Are drives hot swapable with this unit?  
Van T

Accepted Answer

Van,

The design of the case is such that it would not be possible to hot swap the drives.  I'm not sure if the chip and / or Windows would recognize the drives if you even could hot swap the drives.

I've never tried to hot swap drives since I built my first computer in 1977.  Probably not  good idea,unless you are using high end server equipment designed for that purpose.

Dave

Question 5

Can you put drives with existing data into this enclosure set to JBOD and just start using the disks or do they have to be "initialized" losing all data on them?

Accepted Answer

It worked for me, so I don't see why it wouldn't work for you. I put my media hard drives from my old machine into this when I built a new PC. I had no issues.

Question 6

Has anybody been able to get good SMART health data through this enclosure?  I have tried many things in both Linux and Windows, but I cannot get SMART health data.  Under Linux I tried both USB and eSATA.  In USB mode smartctl at best is able to find that it is talking to the JMicron controller via SCSI (SAT), but cannot get much of anything intelligible.  Forcing the usbjmicron driver just returns complete gibberish.  With eSATA mode (had to dig around for a proper FIS enabled eSATA controller) there does seem to be some sort of SMART pass-through happening, however the health data does not pass through.  Under Windows I had to dig around for smart monitoring tools that support USB, but non of the USB enabled monitoring tools I came across were able to query the SMART health data.  So if anybody has been able to get full SMART data through this enclosure, please post what you did.  Otherwise I am considering this to be a broken implementation and one that is important to me as I don't want to be sticking my data on a drive that is about to die because I was not able to see the SMART data in order to know better.

Accepted Answer

Try using Hard disk Sentinel.  According to Mediasonic (another enclosure manufacturer using the JMicron controller) Hard disk Sentinel will provide the info - http://forum.mediasonic.ca/viewtopic.php?f=103&t=2750.   Note, you will need to have TWO hard drive connected in order to read SMART data.  This is known limitation of the controller.  With other programs you could only read SMART data from one drive; again with two connected.  However, it appears with Hard disk Sentinel you can get SMART data from both.  I have not tested this but it looks like it works.

Question 7

I have one of these working in JBOD mode through USB 3.0.  This mode works well.  However an issue I have come across is while I tried to plug it into both the integrated Intel C610/X99 SATA controller and the integrated ASMedia ASM1062 controller on this motherboard is neither works.  I found the answer for why the Intel controller does not work (at least in JBOD mode) is it does not have PM (port multiplier) support.  The ASMedia ASM1062 does have Port Multiplication listed as a feature on the product page, but it looks like it does not support FIS mode, which it looks like the JMS562 controller on this enclosure does use and actually the mode you want if you want the PM function to be speedy.  I also see lots of errors in the logs backing up the notion that FIS mode is not supported by the ASMedia controller.

So the question is especially seeing I am running Linux, is there a particular recommended eSATA card / SATA chipset recommended?  I do have an Avago (LSI) 9361-8i laying around, but I do not have the cabling to test to see if that will work with a SATA port multiplier.  All I see in the documentation is it will work with SAS expanders, which is a different technology.  So it would also be good to know if this will work.

Accepted Answer

This is the reason why we ditched this enclosure for Linux.  It's a crap shoot for the eSATA support.  ASMedia seemed like the better controller compared to others, like Marvell.  SAS expanders don't support port multiplier.   They allow you to connect multiple drivers via a single controller with each connection supporting a single drive.

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