USB3 to SATA 3.5" enclosures without energy-saving mode

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

do you know any USB3 to SATA2 or SATA3 bridge, 3.5" HDD enclosure for
less than 25,- €, that is without an energy-saving mode and at least
allows usage of drives up to 2 TiB?

A long time ago I purchased a WD Elements. After a while, between 10 and
30 minutes, at the moment I don't remember the exact idle time, it spins
down. It's a bundle, so I can't replace the HDD without breaking the
enclosure and it's USB2. Until now it is the only drive, that has got an
energy-saving mode, that does work without issues. If it's sleeping and
a Linux machine want's to access the drive, it spins up and works.

A while back I bought a fantec DB-ALU2e. After being idle for 20 minutes
it spins down and maybe it even spins down without being idle at all. If
you have good luck, a Linux machine can wake it up and access the drive
to read and write, but most of the times it just returns an input/output
error, this could happen while running tar to backup a partition. I got
a fantec DB-ALU3e as replacement for the DB-ALU2e. The DB-ALU3e never
goes into energy-saving mode, so nowadays I already own two of them,
since this is the best solution.

A few days ago I decided to buy a fantec DB-ALU3-6G, unfortunately it
spins down after 20 minutes, too. Sometimes it's possible to wake it up,
but it also could fail with an input/output error. Today I returned the
enclosure to the dealer.

Note, some users might not be aware that several mechanisms
automatically wake up sleeping drives. IOW if you have got e.g. gvfs
installed, you might guess that you enclosure does not have an energy-
saving mode, but actually it could be that after for example 20 minutes
the drive spins down and gvfs immediately wakes up the drive. There is a
lot of software that wakes up drives immediately, even smartd does so.

I'm a command line user, gvfs and some alike software isn't installed at
all on my machine and while I'm using tools such as smartctl, I don't
run daemons such as smartd.

In short, at the moment I know that

 fantec DB-ALU3e

does the job, but I also want to know an alternative.

I'm aware that

 fantec DB-ALU2e (anyway a discontinued USB2 enclosure)

and

 fantec DB-ALU3-6G

do not work, they cause input/output errors.

After sending requests to a few vendors, I already got a reply from

  Inter-Tech

They only provide enclosures with power-saving mode and the support
wrote a lot of blah-blah related to requirements and possible issues
with power-saving mode. IOW they are aware about issues with their
enclosures, but if there are problems, the reason for trouble is not
their enclosure. Maybe they are right, I don't care, since without an
energy-saving mode at all, nothing related to an energy-saving mode
could fail, what ever would be the possible culprit, the OS, the BIOS
settings, especially of Intel machines (and I'm using an Intel machine)
or the enclosure.

Regards,
Ralf

PS: If somebody should be interested, since I'm using Ubuntu 16.04 and
Arch Linux, I also posted this request at 
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=249411 .