StarTech.com 3.5in 4 Drive eSATA USB FireWire External SATA RAID Enclosure

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Price: $216.99    

Product Feature

• Support for up to 4 drives provide large amounts of storage with a choice of high speed interfaces from USB 2.0, FireWire400/800 or eSATA
• The removable front cover and accessible drive bays allows drives to be replaced easily in case of failure or upgraded
• Built-in support for numerous RAID modes for most personal/business needs and an 80mm controllable cooling fan to keep drives from overheating
• High Speed USB 2.0 host interface, with transfer rates up to 480Mbps
• SATA revision 2 compliant eSATA host interface with transfer rates up to 3.0Gbps
• 3.5" drive enclosure with SATA revision 2 compliant eSATA host interface with transfer rates up to 3.0Gbps
• 3.5in SATA enclosure with 1394a FireWire 400 and 1394b FireWire800 host interfaces with transfer rates up to 400Mbps and 800Mbps respectively
• An 80mm controllable cooling fan keeps the 3.5? hard drives (HDD) from overheating
• External storage array with built-in support for numerous RAID modes for most personal/business needs
• FireWire 400 and 800 host interfaces with transfer rates up to 400Mbps and 800Mbps respectively
• Support for up to four 3.5in hard drives (HDD) provides this eSATA/USB RAID enclosure with large amounts of external storage with a choice of high speed interfaces from USB 2.0, FireWire400/800 or eSATA
• Supported RAID modes: 0 (stripe), 1 (mirror), 3 (parity disk), 5 (striped parity), 10 (1+0), Span/Concatenation
• Supported RAID modes: 0 (stripe), 1 (mirror), 3 (parity disk), 5(stripped parity), 10 (1+0), Span/Concatenation
• The removable front cover and accessible drive bays of this external storage solution allows hard drives (HDD) to be replaced easily in case of failure or upgraded
• USB to SATA enclosure with High Speed USB 2.0 host interface, with transfer rates up to 480Mbps
• User configurable directly from the unit itself

Product Description

Turn 4 SATA hard drives into external RAID storage that connects over USB/FireWire/eSATA The S354UFER External SATA RAID Enclosure is a high-performance external RAID storage solution, supporting up to 4 high capacity (tested with up to 4TB per bay) 3.5" SATA hard drives (supports SATA, SATA II and SATA III-6Gbps). The 4-bay RAID enclosure can be connected to the host/source computer through USB, eSATA or FireWire and automatically builds your SATA RAID array based on your selection (Spanning, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 1+0, RAID 3, and RAID 5 supported), delivering a simple, yet flexible external storage solution. Designed for convenience, the enclosure features front panel LED indicators that provide RAID information and simple hard drive status and activity monitoring. The enclosure also features a built-in 3-speed 80mm fan with automatic or manual controls that allow you to customize the speed of the fan as necessary, ensuring suitable operating temperatures for optimized drive performance.

StarTech.com 3.5in 4 Drive eSATA USB FireWire External SATA RAID Enclosure Review

I bought this to offload data from a Lacie RAID5 unit which I had to send in for warranty service. From the moment I received it I wished I'd bought it originally instead of the Lacie unit. For one thing, the Lacie unit came with drives installed in removable drive trays but one can't change the drive in the tray oneself without voiding the warranty. I much prefer being able to purchase my own drives and swap them myself -- particularly in a RAID unit where a single drive failure eliminates the security the RAID was providing until the drive is replaced. When the first drive failed in the Lacie unit, I had to send it in and wait on replacement whereas I would have preferred to just run to the store, buy another drive and only pursue the warranty service on the failed drive after replacing it in the RAID.

The Startech unit does not use drive trays -- the drives slide into the case directly. The unit comes with a set of handles which attach to the drives using the front set of mounting screws along the side of the drive. The handle lays flat against the face of the drive after installation but swivels out to give you something to tug on to remove the drive. I think I would have preferred some sort of an ejector to push the drive away from the connections and out of the unit slightly so as not to have to bother attaching the handles but they were easy to attach (it even comes with a small screwdriver for the task) and I am not swapping the drives with anything else so there is no harm in having the handles attached.

Once the drives were installed, I ran across what is, so far, my only real complaint about the unit. The cover which fits on the front of the unit over the drives, has a latch which is actuated by a push on the cover -- in other words, push it once, it latches into place; push it again, it comes loose for removal. Problem is, after installing the drives and picking the unit up to move it to its resting spot; arranging it in place; rotating it to attach cables; etc., every time I turned around I was grabbing the front of the unit and the cover immediately popped off. Rather annoying.

After getting it set up, I created the RAID. While building the array is quite easy, how to do it isn't obvious from looking at the unit so it is important not to lose the owners manual. I chose to go with RAID 1+0. Since this is a simple arrangement of striping + mirroring there was not much setup required and the array was built in less than a minute. I only had one esata port on the machine I was copying the data from and it was attached to the Lacie unit so I was forced to use USB 2.0 for the Startech -- thanks to the slower connection, transfer of 1.5 TB of data took quite awhile. Once transferred, I hooked it up via esata and transfer speeds now seem very quick -- I haven't done any benchmarks but subjectively I am very happy with the performance.

Rather than going with straight activity lights/leds on the front of the unit, Startech put the multicolored LEDs behind some sort of lens/diffuser/whatever which creates a non-glaring bar of light across the front of the unit. The bar is blue when there is no drive activity and changes to a pleasant pinkish-lavender when the drives are being accessed. The four segments (for the four drives) blend into each other so blue segments sort of flow into purple segments. It's a nice touch -- it lets you know what is happening without blinding you from halfway across the room like the lights on some PCs/electronics these days. There are a number of other status lights behind a semi-translucent plastic panel containing icons to identify the meaning of the status light (such as the fan level and setting), the RAID level and status, etc.

Though the fan allows different settings to trade-off noise for cooling performance, I have left it on the auto setting and have found the fan to be very quiet. I can't imagine it being a problem for anyone.

I am using the unit on a Linux system but it should work on pretty much any system which supports one of its connections: esata/usb/firewire. Since the RAID controller is built into the unit, and controlled through hardware buttons on the case, no special drivers are required.

All in all a nice little unit -- compact in size, with a lot of nice features and it seems to work great. I'm very pleased.

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