What I am looking for is a unit that allows me to swap out the fourth drive so I can use several (near line 4th drives).
1609634
You can do that but the drive rebuilding process takes a long time and this unit isn't hot-swappalbe so you would have to shut down and open the case. You can attach external drives and back up files to them.
723799
I'm not sure. That might be needed. I still haven't been able to get mine to work in either drive yet.
2205751
If you set up as a raid mirror you can hot swap the drives as long as one of the 2TB drives is working to copy your data from. Raid must be mirror not stripe.
1656451
I am not sure about the hot spare but it can be configured with RAID5 using 3 drives.
1972508
sure hope you have not used more on the drive the terrabyte drive that is usuallly its customarry to replace with same size drive or larger for that very reason but load in the4 new drive and and the old make secondary you can send all to the new drive or drag and drop in new drive
727945
YES, and it fast and can swap other hard drives anytime without shutting down. It is remarkable, in fact am buying another one. I am using now to swap between 3T and 4T HD's.
2093493
Although I haven't done it with this particular array (I'm using it in RAID5), by the regular principals, it doesn't look good. If they were individual drives, absolutely not. If they are removed from another JBOD, they would have to be in the same order, and would depend on having the same firmware. Basically... I wouldn't try it with any array. What you're looking for is probably something with a port multiplier in it so that each drive is handled individually by your OS. Then you'd need a port-multiplier compatible eSATA card (or usb if you like slow drives).
2235682
No, RAIDS do not work this way, you cannot change between types on the fly. however, XRAID, which this model offers would give you redundancy and is expandable (can't remember if this can be done with 2 drives though).
664030
Yes, you can use multiple items or jump drives at the same time. It is awesome!
251145
No you can't. The master drive has to be pysically removed from the system and put into Master slot A and the alternate/Slave or clone drive will be placed in slot B.
2247618
I haven't tried it yet, but when I called the company they said that it would, but you have to use two drives with the same capacity.
378109
Yes, you can mix different drives up to 4TB in size each for a total of 32TB.
1687900
Yes, but you may need to replace the hard drive cable to accommodate two drives.
1848758
The one I received didn't work at all. I returned it for a Drobo. I use 2TB drives in the Drobo so I don't know about 4 in that.
833331
just look for a molex drive power splitter for IDE. or if you are using a SATA drive there are ones for that. they are pretty common place. look on amazon .. i know micro-center has them i got one yesterday.
1508983
The Vantec NexStar USB can clone one drive to the next and works really well as long as you have the same size drives or a smaller first drive and larger second drive.
243983
I actually returned the unit as I wanted to clone more than one PC hard drive to it, but learned that it was not possible to do this. I have two big LaCie drives where I do exactly what you'd like to do. It works well. I can only assume (note assume) that that backup process can work with his drive. Richard Chay