Still, my laptop is bursting its 512GB SSD and anything is better than my current backup method of randomly distributing copies of important data on external USB drives in various states of health.
I settled on a mid price solution, two 4TB Seagate Barracuda and an IcyBox IB-RD3621U3 RAID enclosure, for about 250€ in total. Rsynced to a 4TB WD mobile drive I keep in daily use.
Setup procedure:
- S.M.A.R.T. self test. Note: the IcyBox board is not Smart capable. To do a full initial self test on the drives, plug them into a desktop SATA. (smartctl -d sat provides output, but the test will fail)
- Disk installation in the drive: note - there are handy stickers 'HDD1' and 'HDD2' in the box. Label your disks to correspond with the HDD1 and 2 labels on the front of the IcyBox.
- RAID mode:
Switch the box off (1). Set the pins under MODE (2) to RAID1. Hold OK (3) pressed, switch the box on (1) and keep holding OK until the LED band at the front has stopped blinking in red (should take about 10 seconds)
- Connect to a computer. The box should now register as a single drive in GParted, which you can format at will.
- Note: GParted via the Dell XPS USB-C dongle hell didn't work too well, failed at creating the partition table.
