Reddit mentions of Mediasonic ProRaid 2 Bay 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Enclosure – USB 3.0 & eSATA Support 16TB & UASP Protocol (HUR3-SU3S3)

It's an external RAID array enclosure. Here's a link to it:

https://www.amazon.com/Mediasonic-ProRaid-SATA-Drive-Enclosure/dp/B00KCEAXJW/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1549666647&sr=1-1&keywords=Mediasonic+HUR3-SU3S3

I have it in RAID 1 with two 2 TB Seagate drives.

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For those that are curious:

• The stack on the far left contains six Orange Pi Zero's on top and one Orange Pi Zero Plus on the bottom.
  
• To the right of the stack is a Raspberry Pi 3.
  
• In the center is an Orange Pi PC 2.
  
• On the far right are two Rock64's. The one on top is the 2GB model, and the one on the bottom is a 4GB model. (I have one more 2GB model on order.)
  
• In the back left is an iSelector 10-port charging station. (I went with this one because it advertised that it could put out 2.4A on all 10 ports.)
  
• In the back right is a MediaSonic ProRaid 2-bay SATA enclosure, with two Seagate 2TB Barracudas loaded into it.
  
• On the bottom is a TP-Link 24-port gigabit switch. (It's mounted vertically because I made the mistake of mounting it in the front of the rack; if I had mounted it the right way, the door would have pushed against the ends of the cables and probably caused them to exceed their MBR. One of these days I'll move it to the back of the rack.)
  
  What am I using them for?
  
  
• All of the Orange Pis, the Raspberry Pi, and the 2GB Rock64 board are running a program to search for a solution to the Magic Square of Squares problem. It's a custom program written in C, so it doesn't need much memory or disk space; mainly what it needs is processor power. The Orange Pis are cheap, which makes them a good fit for this.
  
• The 2GB Rock64 is also running a bot to search for cut-and-paste moves on Wikipedia.
  
• The 4GB Rock64 is going to be my new web server. (Right above it, just out the frame, is an HP ProLiant DL140 G1 that this board will be replacing. The HP is probably more powerful, but it's loud and it sucks up more electricity than the Rock64 does.) I picked this one because it supports USB3, it has gigabit ethernet, it has 4GB of ram (which is the same as the HP that this will be replacing), and it didn't cost an arm and a leg.
  
• The other 2GB Rock64 (when it comes) will be used to network share a 4TB backup drive. (Right now, the drive is hooked up to a VM on another server.)
  
• All of these boards are running Armbian, except for the Raspberry Pi (which is running their Debian distro).

Hands "RAID processing to the CPU" crap, wow really. had not idea that is a thing with the PCIe RAID adapters. And to think, I was looking into them earlier. thanks for that heads up. in this case the storage unit I am looking to get requires you to set the RAID at the storage unit before connecting to any system. 2-bay storage I am currently using the same one now.

One option is to go with a Synology. There are a lot of models to choose from, you could pick one with enough power. There are pros and cons with Synology. I used one for several years until a software update corrupted the raid. I had a backup, so not big deal, but my trust level in Synology went to zero.

Another option is a linux server. I got an Intel NUC (and 8gb ram + 128gb ssd):
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MSZTD8N/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

And this enclosure:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KCEAXJW/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I now have everything I had with the Synology plus a whole lot more power and versatility. You could even bump up to the i3 for a little more. The great thing about these NUC's is they use very little power and are extremely reliable. I have several that have been running 24/7 for years without even a hiccup.

Yeah, something like this

I use one of Mediasonic's ProRaid boxes. I've been using it for about a year in Raid 0 configuration. No complaints, it was a great starter box for grouping a bunch of HDD's together for a Plex server. I've been backing up my data to ACD but come January that won't be an option anymore. I'm saving up for a more long term solution using (thinking a Drobo as well).