Have I screwed up my plan for world domination?

So, the plan was to get a NAS (N2200) with 2x1.5 TB drives in JBOD, then use a 3TB USB drive to back it up. The N2200 has been up and working for a while now, so this week I purchased a 3TB drive and Icy dock. A nice green bullet proof solution thought I.

I was wondering why WD had bundled the drive with a SATA host controller, until I found that Win7 wouldn't see more than 700 odd GB. A little research (and I acknowledge I should have done this beforehand) and it seems that I need a SATA controller that supports 64bit LBA (or summat like that). And whatdya know, that's not the SB850 chipset? The host controller won't fit into my main rig as some screws in the waterblock are preventing me from sloting it into a spare PCI-Ex... grrrrr!

So, the controller sn now in rig #3, with the plan to format it in there, then pop it into the USB caddy. Unless someone far more knowledgable than I knows already, I'll let you all know whether my main rig reads it in the USB dock afterwards. Then it's a case of seeing if the N2200 firmware can cope with it as well.

I think the phrase rhymes with clucking bell, to paraphrase Mr. Rimmer!

Personally I'd of looked for an esata not usb external drive, backing up 3tb of data on usb2 is going to take a good long while.

The other alternative would be a 5.25"bay 3.5" sata hot swap bay, then you just need to buy a 3tb hard drive, pop it in to make a backup then take it out and store it safely some place.
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/icy-d...nterchangeable

The Icy Dock I've got supports eSATA, but I don't think the NAS does. It's all set up with the usb backup module. Time to take the backup wasn't the point, it was just having one.

Maybe I could consider backing up over the LAN to the 3TB drive, but that doesn't necessrily help as I've currently only got the PCIEx host controller that can utilise the full drive capacity.

Unless you plan on having a single 3TB partition you might well be able to get everything to see the full drive if you split both the raid and the single drive to slightly smaller chunks.

Try 3x 1TB on both the raid and the drive and see if each end can see it all ok.

There's a fair availability of esata to USB adapters that MAY work ok in this case (unsure if there's any driver requirement, the one I just found on a google product search only mentions the adapter and user guide as package contents).

Well, after a mammoth session formatting the drive (after 4 hours it was time for bed so with only 32% done I left the PC on over night!), the drive now reports correctly through the USB Icy Dock on my main PC. All set then I hope :)