7 expansion enclosures in stock, 3 to 25 bays. None of them works without a card in the host machine and the right external cable. Budget the HBA before the shelf - the box alone powers on, spins its drives and stays invisible to the operating system.
Prices updated · 7 in stock
A JBOD or expansion enclosure is a shelf of drives and a backplane. It has no USB controller and nothing that a computer can talk to on its own. It needs a host bus adapter with an external port in the machine, plus the right cable. Buy the box alone and it will power on, spin the drives and be invisible to the operating system.
Two families of connector, and they are not interchangeable. SFF-8088 is the older external mini-SAS, found on 6Gb/s-era cards. SFF-8644 is external mini-SAS HD, found on 12Gb/s cards. A card with internal SFF-8087 or SFF-8643 ports has nothing to plug an external enclosure into at all - internal and external connectors of the same generation look similar and do not mate.
QNAP’s SATA JBOD line is the same trap wearing different wires: those units connect through a bundled PCIe SATA host card rather than SAS. Different cable, identical requirement - a free PCIe slot and a card in it. Our HBA pages cover which cards have external ports, and IT mode covers why you want the card presenting raw disks rather than RAID volumes.
7 in-stock listings · Needs a host card in the machine. External SAS or QNAP's PCIe-SATA - different wires, same requirement. · every specification here is the maker’s own claim, read from the listing · refreshed every few hours
| Enclosure | Bays | Connection | Host requirement | Price | Per bay | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
ICY DOCK MB830SP-B ICY DOCK Hot Swap 3 Bay 3.5 Inch SATA/SAS HDD Docking Enclosure Mobile Rack | 3 | SAS | host card required | $79.95 | $26.65 | Buy Now |
ICY DOCK MB326SP-1B ICY DOCK MB326SP-1B 6-Bay 2.5” SATA/SAS SSD/HDD Hot-Swap Mobile Rack Enclosu | 6 | SAS | host card required | $90.99 | $15.16 | Buy Now |
ICY DOCK MB324SP-1B ICY DOCK ExpressCage MB324SP-1B 4 Bay 2.5” SATA/SAS HDD SSD Hot-Swap Mobile | 4 | SAS | host card required | $93.20 | $23.30 | Buy Now |
ICY DOCK MB993SK-B ICY DOCK Triple 3 Bay 2.5 inch SAS/SATA HDD & SSD Mobile Rack Enclosure for | 3 | SAS | host card required | $100.90 | $33.63 | Buy Now |
ICY DOCK MB607SP-B ICY DOCK 4 Bay 2.5 SAS/SATA HDD/SSD Metal Mobile Rack Enclosure for 5.25" Ba | 4 | SAS | host card required | $114.95 | $28.74 | Buy Now |
ICY DOCK MB516SP-B ICY DOCK Full Metal 16 x 2.5 SAS/SATA HDD/SSD Mobile Rack Enclosure for 2 x | 25 | SAS | host card required | $359.95 | $14.40 | Buy Now |
QNAP TL-D400S QNAP TL-D400S 4 Bay SATA 6Gbps JBOD Storage Enclosure | 4 | PCIe SATA | host card required | $449.00 | $112.25 | Buy Now |
Enclosure and drives only. The host bus adapter and external cable are a separate purchase and are NOT in this total - see the warning above. 26 items across 2 listings. In-stock listings only. Anything out of stock when this page loaded is named below rather than silently dropped.
| Item | Qty | Each | Line | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EnclosureICY DOCK MB516SP-B (25-bay) | x1 | $359.95 | $359.95 | Buy |
| DriveHP 695842-001 4TB SAS 6G (4TB) | x25 | $59.99 | $1499.75 | Buy |
| Basket total | $1859.70 | |||
These are our current tracked prices. Amazon sets the seller and the final price at checkout - verify before you buy. Opening any item starts an Amazon session, and anything you add there is part of the same order - you do not need to come back here between items.
An expansion enclosure is deliberately stupid. It has bays, a backplane, a power supply and fans. It has no processor, no operating system and no controller that a computer can enumerate on its own. Everything that makes drives appear happens in the host machine.
That is a feature rather than a limitation, and it is why this class exists at the price it does. Because the enclosure contains almost nothing, it is cheap per bay, it has almost nothing to fail, and the thing doing the work - your HBA, your ZFS pool, your mdadm array - is software you control and can debug. Compare that with a consumer enclosure that builds a RAID array inside a controller you cannot replace when the box dies.
The cost of that simplicity is that the enclosure is one component of a three-part purchase: the shelf, the card, and the cable. Miss any one and you have a box that hums.
External SAS has two connector generations in common use and they are not compatible with each other. SFF-8088 is the older external mini-SAS, associated with 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s cards. SFF-8644 is external mini-SAS HD, the 12Gb/s generation. A cable for one does not fit the other.
The trap underneath that is internal versus external. The internal connectors of the same two generations are SFF-8087 and SFF-8643, and they are similar enough in appearance that people buy the wrong card. A card with four internal SFF-8643 ports has plenty of bandwidth and nowhere to plug an external enclosure. What you need is a card with EXTERNAL ports, and the listing will say external if it has them.
QNAP's SATA JBOD line does the same job over different wires. Those units connect through a bundled PCIe SATA host card rather than SAS, so the cable question changes and the requirement does not: a free PCIe slot and a card in it. We file both under one class here and keep the true wire in the connection column, because a page that called a SATA JBOD an SAS one would be misleading in a way that costs somebody a cable.
The other requirement worth checking before ordering is the slot itself. An HBA wants a PCIe x8 slot, physically and electrically. A machine with one x16 slot already holding a graphics card, and nothing else but x1 slots, does not have anywhere to put it.
A card that presents RAID volumes is the wrong card for this. The whole reason to attach a shelf of raw disks is so the host's filesystem can see every drive, read its SMART data, and manage redundancy itself. A RAID controller in between hides all three.
Cards in this family ship from the factory with IR firmware, which presents volumes, and IT firmware exists which presents raw disks. Many used listings advertise a card as already flashed to IT mode - that is a seller claim and worth treating as one until you have checked the firmware yourself, which is the same position we take on our HBA pages.
The reason to care is not ideological. A RAID controller between ZFS and the disks means ZFS cannot see a drive starting to fail, cannot read its error counters, and cannot make the decisions it was designed to make. It also means that when the controller dies, the array's layout lives in a card you now have to source an identical replacement for.
Per bay, this is usually the cheapest storage expansion that exists - the cheapest bay across these rows is $14.40. A used external SAS shelf carries a lot of bays for very little money, because the box is mostly sheet metal and a backplane.
The comparison worth making is against buying a bigger chassis. A twenty-four bay server chassis is expensive, heavy, loud, and requires you to move everything into it. A twelve-bay shelf on the end of a cable next to the machine you already have costs a fraction of that and can be added on a Saturday.
The comparison against a second NAS is even more lopsided, because a NAS is a whole computer with a processor, memory and an operating system licence's worth of software, and you already have one of those.
What you give up is portability and noise. These shelves were built for datacentres and many of them sound like it. If the machine lives in an office rather than a basement, that is a real consideration and the fans are frequently the first thing owners replace.
The enclosures hub has the DAS-versus-JBOD-versus-NAS decision in full · USB DAS · HBAs · shucking · SATA drives · drive docks · add power protection.
This page exists because the catalogue holds at least 3 enclosures in this class. Classes below that floor are not published rather than published thin - the hub links only what exists.
A host bus adapter with EXTERNAL ports - SFF-8088 for the older generation or SFF-8644 for 12Gb/s mini-SAS HD - in a free PCIe x8 slot. Internal connectors of the same generations, SFF-8087 and SFF-8643, look similar and do not mate with external cables. Check the listing says external, and check you have the slot before ordering the shelf.
Yes. Those units connect through a PCIe SATA host card, usually bundled with the enclosure, rather than over SAS. Different cable, identical requirement: a free PCIe slot and a card in it. We group them with SAS JBODs for that reason and keep the actual wire in the connection column so nothing gets called SAS that is not.
For a ZFS or mdadm array, yes. IT firmware presents raw disks so the filesystem can see every drive and read its SMART data; IR firmware presents RAID volumes and hides all of that. Used cards are often advertised as already flashed - treat that as a seller claim and verify the firmware yourself.
Per bay, substantially - the enclosure is sheet metal, a backplane and a power supply, with none of the processor, memory or software a NAS pays for. The trade-offs are noise, since much of this hardware was built for datacentres, and the fact that you are buying three things rather than one: the shelf, the card and the cable.