Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I wanted an external RAID for my Mac. I was initially quite convinced to buy one of the Drobo units. While looking at reviews of the Drobo S, one reviewer recommended this unit over the Drobo S, because it's 'basically the same product for half the price'. It is most definitely NOT the same thing. I have just unpacked and installed my unit with 3 WD 2 TB Green drives 2TB Caviar Sata 3 64MB 3.5IN Green, also purchased from Amazon. I hooked them up to my 17" Mac Book Pro via a Syba Best Connectivity SATA II Expresscard/34mm Syba Best Connectivity SATA II Expresscard/34mm and 2x eSATA ports. As per reviews for the Expresscard, I had to download a driver. All seems to work well.
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Unlike the Drobo S, THIS UNIT IS NOT EXPANDABLE.
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This information is NOT in the manual. I only found this information on the factory website after looking in their 'Community' area. What that means is this: If you set your unit up originally with 3 drives (MINIMUM configuration for RAID 5 in this tower per the manual), and you decide later to 'pop an extra drive in' to expand your capacity ala the Drobo units, you are in for a big surprise. In order for the RAID controller built into this unit to recognize the drive, you will have to reformat the entire RAID and lose all your data!! In all fairness to Sans Digital, there are not many RAID controllers that will do this (so I'm told). But, in all fairness to those of us that are NOT computer geeks, they should reveal this fact somewhere prominently. I ordered the my unit with 3 drives, thinking I would buy another drive later if my needs increased. Well, that plan won't work. Where is one going to find the room to store all that data prior to formatting your RAID? I am torn between returning this unit and ordering a Drobo S or FS, or keeping this unit and ordering 2 additional hard drives so that I won't have to format in order to expand later if I need to.
So when you're shopping and comparing costs of this and the Drobo keep this in mind in addition to the costs of the empty RAID enclosure! I could have had a functional Drobo S (my storage needs are not that great right now) for 709 + 119 + 119 = $947 (Drobo only needs 2 units to get redundancy and $119 is the Amazon current cost for the 2TB WD Green drives). While I ended up spending 308 + 5*(119) = $903 for the Sans Digital Tower Raid. Yes, yes, yes. I understand that I'm getting a LOT more storage for my money, BUT, just remember that I didn't really NEED that much storage yet. I could have paid tomorrow's prices for the additional storage when I needed it.
I decided to keep the Sans Digital unit: Throughput is faster. It is very quiet. Set up was easy. And, now I have a TON of storage! I must keep in mind Moore's Law and the fact that when I bought my first hard drive I NEVER thought I would fill up 5 whole megabytes.
If anything further develops, I'll post an addendum. 4 stars instead of 5 secondary to lack of information about expandability.
Click Here to see more reviews about: TowerRAID TR5UT-B - 5 Bay SATA to USB2.0 / eSATA Hardware RAID 5 Enclosure (Black)
The TowerRAID TR5UT-B is a hardware RAID 5 five bay enclosure that utilizes the widely available USB 2.0 and performance orientated eSATA to provide over 200MB/s performance. Build-in support for RAID 0, 1, 10, 3, 5 with hot-spare support and JBOD, TR5UT-B provides hardware RAID redundancy protection against hard drive failure. New RAID mode, CLONE mode or N-Way Mirror, are introduced to support same copy of the data in all of the hard drives installed. Since RAID engine is embedded in the enclosure, all RAID parity calculation will be offload to the unit, instead of using the controller card or computer to provide high performance storage. Hardware RAID enclosure also eliminates OS compatibility issues, since no software is required. In order to satisfy the need for performance hungry application, each unit is bundled with PCIe 2.0 x1 two ports eSATA controller card with SATA 6.0 Gbps (6G) support (Highpoint Tech R622 Controller card). PCIe 2.0 provides twice the bandwidth of PCIe 1.0 unit, allowing over 200MB/s performance in PCIe 2.0 support slot. The backward compatible with PCIe 1.0 slots allow using the unit in any PCIe slot, to provide eSATA connectivity for the computer without eSATA build-in. Designed with easy installation in mind, TR5UT-B comes with 5 easy to install hard drives trays and dust-free protective ventilating cover. TR5UT-B is the ultimate eSATA RAID 5 storage for all of your storage need.
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