Does it sound like coil whine?

Was this the L1Techs video? I think he’s planning on doing a proper comparison/review of USB enclosures which would answer some questions.

I would get a proper server case with a backplane. It’ll save so many headaches with cable management, and they distribute power a lot more safely than running many long cables would.

My system has been a lot more stable since I started using a hot swap backplane and server PSU. Before that I would lose a drive every 3-6 months. It’s also a lot quieter and the drives run cooler.

They don’t get sold so much because the EU holds sellers accountable for faulty products a lot more. Plus GDPR makes it simpler to shred drives than wipe and resell them.

There are a lot on AliExpress being shipped from China, so they should ship to you too. If not, then a reshipper like SuperBuy would.

It’s open source, so it would be easy to do a security audit

Mega is trustworthy. You can see the client code on git, and you can check the code in the browser if you like. It’s encrypted in the browser then sent to the server encrypted and without sending the password.

You can verify it yourself, but if they were lying then some security researcher would have already made their career by finding and publicising the lie.

*in the US

AWS offers exactly this. You upload to S3, then reserve the storage (at a discount) for a few years. You can pay upfront.

It’s not cheap, but it’s the most reliable and secure option for a business.

Almost definitely not, but as you have both in front of you, you’re the best person to find out for us

Watch out for voltage drop. If you have high current and long wires then your voltage will drop below the minimum the drives need and you’ll get random dropouts during heavy writes. Get around it by using short wires and not too many drives per wire. Or use server PSUs which are designed for longer runs.

Having done this, its a lot simpler to buy a SAS DAS and swap the fans. The biggest noise tends to be the disks, which will be there anyway. Enterprise gear tends to weigh more and have good disk mounts which does a lot to deaden the sound the drives make, especially during seeks.