The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/CaputHumerus on 2025-02-01 20:22:41.
I’ve got 5 HDDs (3x4TB, 1x6TB, 1x12TB) in a Yottamaster 5-bay enclosure. Drivepool makes them into one drive for Plex (Win11) purposes.
The Yottamaster is driving me crazy. Drives randomly unmount, which causes Drivepool to freak out, and I have to physically pull the drive out and reinsert it to get it to come back. By the time I do that, Plex has updated to remove the missing files and now thinks everything on that remounted drive is a new addition. It’s infuriating.
I now know there are issues with port multipliers and the controller in Yottamaster boxes doing this—I should’ve dug deeper before I bought it. But I haven’t seen another brand that doesn’t have the same issue (Mediasonic boxes did it to me too).
I’m looking for suggestions for different setups. Here are my constraints:
- I’m not going Linux. The Plex computer is also my primary gaming rig.
- I would do NAS if folks think that’ll be more stable
- My PC tower (a Y60) doesn’t have 5 free bays for me to move the drives internal
- I considered a PCI SATA expander to add some SATA ports to my motherboard, but (1) still not enough bays to put the drives internally and (2) I think the PCI ports are blocked because of how the GPU is mounted (Y60 has a riser that flips the GPU onto its side). Probably surmountable if this is 100% the answer.
- I considered a PCI->SATA card with long enough SATA cables to run to an external HDD array, but that seems… a little inelegant.
Ideally, someone knows of a USB-C HDD enclosure that won’t be plagued by this issue, but folks seem pretty down on these devices, so I’m at a loss.