At the start of this year I bought an Orico 9528 external RAID enclosure and two 6TB hard drives. It was pretty easy to set up and I’m running it in a RAID 1 configuration, it seems to be working fine except the fan noise is very loud, a known problem with these units.
Replacing the fan doesn’t seem to be a simple task and I’ve asked several local PC repair and upgrade shops if they would do it but they’ve declined.
As a result I’m considering buying a similar enclosure of a different, and quieter brand, my question is would it be a simple matter of removing the hard-drives from the Orico enclosure and plugging them into a new enclosure again in a RAID 1 configuration? Or would it be more complicated than that.
RAID is the complicating factor here. For any single drive, there would be no problem at all. With RAID… hard to say.
RAID-5 and -6 I would give zero chance unless the brands are identical. There’s too much vendor-specific metadata that is likely to be different. With RAID-0, the odds are a tad higher but still pretty slim. RAID-1, though… it’s just a mirror, so you might get lucky.
I’d say the odds are better than even but not by a lot. You probably won’t destroy your data if it doesn’t work, so if you can return the new unit you might give it a shot. If the new unit says something like “Uninitialized drives detected. Initialize?”, don’t tell it to initialize–it may well wipe both drives.
Personally, I’d try replacing the fan myself. It may not be as difficult as it seems. Take apart the unit, measure the fan dimensions, find a match on eBay, and swap in the new one. They’re basically all 12 volt so it’s hard to screw up too much.
