Mediasonic HFR2-S3B PRORAID Box 4 Bay Raid Enclosure with USB 2.0, eSATA & FireWire 400/800

Comment:
Uncomplicated to setup, quiet, pretty much idiot-proof (just bear in mind the DIP switches!) No monitoring software or interface, so no feedback relating to difficult drive degradation other than the subjective judgment of "Gee...file transfers are acquiring a small slow..." as the internal RAID attempts to compensate for escalating poor cluster counts.Likewise, I'm not also positive that the thermostatically-controlled fan is dependable...preserve an eye on it, and if you don't see the fan speed kick up when the case begins to warm up, then manually set the fan speed and leave it there. Don't put WD-1002FAEX drives into these things. When they fail, they don't necessarily fail outright - instead, poor cluster count climbs and transfer speeds degrade. I would heartily advocate to all who personal these points (I have TWO) to benchmark them with some thing like ATTO Disk Benchmark and then do it once again just about every week or two to check for challenging drive degradation. Said degradation will be apparent - at least, it was for me when my RAID 10s began to slowwwwww down in the course of file transfers. But there weren't any indications of poor disks from the Proraid till I powered the unit absolutely down, removed the disks, and shoved them back in and powered the unit back up.Only then did I get two red lights indicating that two of the Western Digital "These are unsupported for RAID" drives were dying.

Comment:
Box was easy to set up and pre-configured to RAID 5. It accepted 4 2TB Samsung HDs w/o problem. Was able to back up more than 400K RAW and jpeg files accurately Back up took more than three days.Enclosure will not perform in e-SATA which was prime cause for obtain.Tech assistance responded and asked for OS info (Vista 64 Ultimate) but no further f/u from them. Very nice process if it will carry out as advertised. Otherwise it is obsolescent to be replaced by USB3 units.e

Comment:
Solid Raid-five efficiency in a compact unit. Prep time (formatting) was very high, but I was making use of slower 5400 RPM drives, so I just let it run over the weekend....and then a couple of days far more. (Four 2 TB drives) Not seriously a difficulty, you just have to program ahead. Setup was a snap. The only minor concern I had was my laptop or computer putting ports to sleep which would then kick in the energy save mode of the unit. (I was concerned if this kept happening the several spin-ups would shorten drive life)I discovered out how to disable the port sleep and the unit hasn't gone into power save since.I use this with sync software and the information is mainly archival, so the delta-syncs aren't quite major at all.

Comment:
* RAID , 1, 3, five, and 10* Bomb-proof setup* Lots of connectivity possibilities: USB, eSATA, Firewire 400鞐* Auto fan control * Included (paper) documentation is *very* weak - use the web site!* Front door is cheesy This is a solid 4-bay drive enclosure. If you're in the market place for 1, appear no additional.

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Worked okay for 2 months Stopped workingReplacement lost all earlier data See assessment of replacement, but basically this is inexpensive hardware with non-existent support.If you value your information, which you presumably do if you're looking at RAID, buy a product from a organization with customer technical support. Any item, even an expensive 1, can fail; what differentiates merchandise is assistance when it fails.

Comment:
Smaller, Lightweight, Quiet, Really Uncomplicated To Setup! LEDs up front are bright, I'm going to have to tint them out so I don't get distracted watching movies @ night. My case came preset to four drive mode. I plugged in power and it automatically put itself into raid 5 mode, I honestly believed I was going to have to manually configure this but nope, hooked up USB to Computer and had a partition formatted in a matter of seconds. Bravo, time will tell how lengthy this device lasts. I am re-utilizing Seagate drives from a prior raid-5 setup in my tower pc. The drives are approaching five years old with no signs of failure yet. Not seriously concerned with transfer speeds as I will be employing this to store music and other low file size backup.

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Mine came with a bundle - of a 2tb and 1tb drive - combo deal.... Lackluster forums and support facts - for standard users.JBOD not supported - Newegg front page says it is - specifics show its not.Like other men and women have stated - read the manual. Its NOT a poor unit overall. I will be placing a bunch of 1tb drives that I had laying about in it to make a 4tb storage drive for messing about with. But I'd go for a different unit if you have the option - unless you get 2 drives for practically cost-free like I did. JBOD permits you to throw in a bunch of hdds and have them recognized as a single drive.Raid - the smallest drive size is spanned. So if you put in a 1tb and a 2tb you will get 1tb spanned = a total of 2tb space.

Comment:
This thing has worked very properly for me! I stuck four SAMSUNG EcoGreen F2 HD154UI HDDs in there and for the most component have had zero difficulties. Formatted the drives with XFS and set up RAID5 practically 3 months ago and have never ever looked back! Really straightforward to setup on Ubuntu 10.04 linux. The eSATA connection seemed to be actually spotty. But in all honesty, that's most likely my motherboard/operating systems fault additional than anything else. This functions properly with linux incase you were asking yourself. I've only tested it out on Ubuntu ten.04 although.

Comment:
Low-cost, Not Cheesy, 6 TB storage w/RAID 5, Outstanding connectivity for those needing Firewire 400 or 800, USB swift assembly, Quiet, uncomplicated fan replacement if necessary. Quite compact for Desktop. Slightly cheesy front door mount, but it functions well. E-SATA note specs requiring port multiplication(I don't). Documentation is a bit weak. Included are skimpy. YOU Want TO USE Website. If you get a drive error indication, you did some thing wrong. I required bigstorage I could use on line with an iMac quad or plug into the MBPro laptop. The FW800 is ideal for that. If you don't need or want FW, pay attention, the identical box is less costly with few connects.I filled the box with four Seagate 2TB Green drives, i.e. 5900 rpm. They run cool and quiet other than the fan occasionally waking up. They're plenty fast for this purpose.FWIW, I've observed complaints on the 2TB limit, but my hugely much more pricey Thecus NAS has five 1 TB drives, the Thecus limit. It's a good NAS, but it price a complete lot far more, I need to have more room and the FW is quicker than the net. I may well consider a different Mediasonics and jumper the FW if I require more.

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* Quite Quiet - Variable speed controlled fan* RAID five is four-1 - Bonus added drive for storage* Spins down drives on inactivity - 6 eggs for this one* Quickly eSATA - Finding RAID0 speed on RAID5 Array* 6TB space employing four 2TB drives* Basic configuration Had some complications with corruption when utilizing a non port-multiplier capable SATA controller. More concerned about cabinet failure then drive failure. I've attempted three or 4 of these external RAID, all other people except this 1 we had been designed really poorly, with mixture of very noisy fans, drive size restriction, and no other people would spin down drives on inactivity.It was a steal at 贘, I would buy another at that value.

Comment:
Nice quiet unit. Appears to function just fine. I have it set up as a mirrored raid. Connection is easy. I'm working with the firewire connection. Receiving the drives in and the internal frame aligned once more was not effortless. Documentation is not very very good. Be cautious when you are setting this up. I guess it's my fault but I lost an whole disc of information when I initial set this thing up. I had a disc full of information that I took out of yet another mirrored raid drive. I placed it in Bay1 of this unit with a different blank drive. I set the dip switches for mirrored raid just as the manual said then fired up the unit. By default the unit began in RAID five mode and as soon as I realized it, I switched it to raid 1. This switch to raid 1 initialized my drives.SET Your RAID preferences (dip switches AND panel selections) just before you install your drives! I believed by putting in my information drive and a blank disc, the machine would just rebuild my RAID.

Comment:
Great cost, good construct good quality, works as expected. This unit has 3 fan settings + 1 auto. Mine is set to auto and always stays on the quietest setting, which is nice. My unit shipped without having a manual, which created set up a bit tricky (hence, minus 1ǘ egg).This unit does not pass through HDD's built in Intelligent information, so there is no way to monitor the difficult drive's health status when utilizing it (hence, minus another 1.five eggs). I've had this unit for two-3 months, and so far it's working great. But, lack of manual and Smart feature brought on it to loose two eggs. If you don't care about these, then it's a quite excellent product for the cost. But with big capacity drives, I feel getting Intelligent is important.

Comment:
low-cost, quiet Flaky interface. Couldn't initialize over FW800, had to use USB. Quit working soon after 1TB copied over, even although it's connected to a Mac Pro and formatted MacOSextended and has three.5TB totally free space. No support. Was missing the FW800 cable which was supposed to be in box; got 2 esata, though. Put 4 identical Seagate 1.5TB drives in and researched how to set it up - and it nonetheless won't function reliably. Make positive to read what instructions there are on CD - the quick start out pamphlet isn't sufficient to set it up. From other reviews on internet, I thought I'd have no dilemma employing it with a Mac - but it's still a dilemma. It would be a nice RAID if it worked.

Comment:
Several RAID selections, very good for the cost, every thing you want in the box minus the drives. Like the other review states, eSATA would not function for me either. Documentation included is not for the casual pc person and not significantly is included Its working superior following you figure out how to set it up with the inferior documentation. if your searching for the eSATA option, attempt this at your own risk. Other then those two gripes, pleased with my obtain.

Comment:
It's small...but it doesn't work It stopped barely working....meaning I sort of got it to work mainly because my computer system saw the raid but when I would attempt to format the partition I created it would fail...then out of nowhere the factor would just power off for no reason.....shortly afterwards it stopped powering on at all...Actual Nice! don't waste your time...buy a raid card and be carried out with it.

Comment:
After reading Richard_T's review, I bought one of these to set up a RAID 5 box with 4TB (3TB usable) storage. I am using 4 1TB drives, all different makes (1>Seagate 7200.11, 2>Seagate 7200.12, 3>WD Green WD10EADS, 4>Hitachi 7K1000.B)Popping in the drives was pretty straight forward if you read user's guide. Selecting the RAID mode involves setting a dip switch and pressing a few buttons.So I plugged in the eSATA port and booted up my comp with the ProRaid, the bios did not detect the drive. I tried to look at it in the disk manager in windows and it didn't show up. Immediately I unplugged the eSATA and switched to good old USB and windows disk manager shows a 3000GB (2.7TB) usb drive. Remember to initialize the partition in GPT instead of MBR if you put more than 2TB in your ProRaid box like I did. Formatted the drive and presto I had a 2.7TB USB drive. But... I wanted an eSATA raid box. Not knowing what to do, I restarted my comp and switched the cable back to eSATA and behold, the bios (my mobo is an Asus P5B) detected a 3000GB drive on my eSata controller.I copied about 800 gigs of stuff onto the Proraid Box using eSATA, the speed is averaging ~70 Mbytes/s (Write) and slightly faster ~75 Mbytes/s (Read). Although I have a feeling that if I had used 4 7200rpm drives instead of the mix setup I have, the overall speed would be faster. Tried a failure test, pulled out one of the drives and the ProRaid continues to be be readable but write access is denied. Powered off the unit, plugged in a drive, and the unit immediately started to rebuild the RAID 5. While it's rebuilding, the read speed on eSATA goes down to about 30 Mbytes/s and write access is denied. Rebuilding time is a repectable 5 hours.So far, it's working...

Comment:
Warning!!: I found out that my esata port does not support >2TB thus I got data corruption once I wrote past the 2TB on 2.72TB raid. USB will support >2TB but max speed is around 30MB/s. Testing firewire at the moment.This is one sweet raid box.Recently I sold my Drobo on Craigs list and needed a simple raid system to replace it. I've been researching all the competing products and the popularity of these small esata raid boxes are on the rise except most of them needs a pci-e card and since I own a shuttle, a pci-e is not an option.It was with trepidation that I picked up this raid box since it may not work with my standard esata port; however since it had usb2 as well as both firewire 400 and 800, I figure at least one of the ports should work.Since I'm a computer geek, I didn't bother to read the cd manual. however after fiddling around for a good 15 minutes and not seeing the drive, I finally read the htm manual that told me to set the dip switches for the number of drives insert ed. Once I did that, the error light went off. However, I still didn't see the drive under esata, so I plugged in my next option which was the USB cable.Plugging the usb in the back of the shuttle gave me a driver not found msg so I tried the front which identified it as a mass storage device. I then proceeded to format it and the unit came up as drive F:Copying a 7.16GB file via USB gave me a transfer rate of 30MB/s which is standard for USB.Knowing that the unit is formatted and accessible, I decided to try esata again as this is the deal breaker on whether I keep or return the unitPowered off the shuttle, plugged esata in and powered on. Normally the ICH9R esata port is hot swappable however you need a drive on that port when it boots up for other drives to be hot swapped.The bios gave me a port 5 error, but after Vista booted up, I watched windows proceeded to install the esata drivers for the drive.Success. The drive came back up as drive F: but running under esata now. I proceeded to copy another 7.81GB of data over to the drive and got a whooping 81MB/s speed as though the drive was local and internal.So for the final test..... I have 15GB of data on 3x500MB wd drives. While I was browsing the files.... I yanked one of the drives out..... There was no hesitation, the directory was still accessible.I pushed the drive back in and the lights immediately began to blink "rebuild". Drive bay 3 was also blinking indicating the drive that was being rebuilt on.During the rebuild, I decided to copy another 7.41 GB file over to the unit to see what the performance hit would be. Not too bad as it only dropped to USB speeds of 30MB/s.At the moment, I'm waiting for the rebuild to complete. So I'll post back once that is done.For what it is worth, this is better then Drobo, much quicker and even the power cable connects better then drobo. This is quality at a cheap price.Don't let the dishwasher look fool you. It is actually very tiny. The width of the thing is exactly the width of a hard drive 5" and the height is 6.5" giving a slight gap between drives to breath. In comparison to the drobo, the drives actually get stuck in Drobo due to the heat. At a glance the unit almost looks like one of those WD bookshelf dual hd; however I have heard that it will support up to 2TB drives, but definitely 1.5TB drives are supported as mentioned by the NCIX sales guy. With so much TB in such a small footprint, it feels like a novelty item rather then a serious raid drive.I do have a small complaint and that is I cannot see the status of the rebuild. It has been working since I left the house to pick up another two WD 1TB green drives from NCIX (last day for their sale).Normally when I power down the computer, the Mediasonic powers down with it (sleep mode). However with raid 5 being rebuilt, the unit remained on when I powered down the computer. After I got home, the raid was still being rebuilt, so I powered it off anyways and powered it back up before I boot up my computer. The unit resumed rebuilding.All files on drive F: remain accessible after booting up. For some reason, port 5 is still giving me a port error but the unit does connect without any problems.Once the rebuild is done, I'll try unbinding the raid into single drives to see how that would look in Vista and whether I can see individual drives with an ICH9R chipset controller which claims that it has a port multiplier.It is unnerving to see blinking lights but not know what the unit is doing.I think I'll read the 6 page manual to see if I missed anythingOk not too shabby, rebuild is done.... approx 2 hours 15 minutes. Lights have stopped blinking and the little unit is clicking away for some reason.. so now on to the individual drive test.... then the final 4x1TB test in which I'll fill it up with data tonight.Ran into several brick walls.... nothing unsurmountable but after owning a Drobo, I have fears of 4 blinking lights....One of the reason that I'm providing a detail review is that I was searching for info for several days on the MediaSonic Raid and found none. I'm taking a gamble on this little system to provide me with an optimum cheap raid system; nothing fancy, no web server, no apps running, just simply a raid with 4TB of hard disk and 3TB usable.The MediaSonic gave me the optional USB/firewire connector that makes it portable without tying it to one system, the system that has the pci-e card that most of these esata raid depends on.So even though I read the html manual throughly, all 6 pages of it, apparently I missed a few fine points. For one, I kept trying to get the unit to span across 3 disk drives and it kept coming up with error.After several minutes I was able to see the unit, but I only had 500MB of space. Thinking that it might be possible that since I switch from Raid 5 to Spanning that there might be some remnants of data or partition blocks on them that is preventing the unit from creating a span disk, I took each drive out and threw them one by one on my nexstar docking station to erase any partition on them, then re-insert  them into the the unit and rebooted.After many minutes of re-building and blinking error lights, I manage to span across 2 out of 3 of the drives; with the error light still on. So I gave up.So I took all the test drives out, and ripped open 4 brand new 1TB WD green drives. Carefully I insert  ed each disk into the unit. Then I remember that I had to set the dip switches back to 4 drives, however the settings are on the cd manual in which the computer is now off. There are no diagrams on the back of the unit to tell you the dip settings.This is where I happen to actually read the chart, apparently you cannot stripe or span 3 drives.....So here is the other kicker.... you cannot set the unit to read 4 separate drives. They do make another unit similar to this one in which I believe you can read 4 separate drives independantly, but not this one. The unit combines all the drives into one logical volume in which you only see one volume period.Now I had this sinking feeling that something was about to go wrong after insert  ing 4x1TB drives on the unit. I reboot Vista and had the unit connected via esata. The unit initialized into raid 5 in only a few seconds and I immediately saw it in the disk management. Only problem was.... only 768MB was available!!I began planning on how I was to return this unit without being dinged for the 15% restocking fee. "you told me that this unit would support 1.5TB drives!! and I'm only using 1TB drives"After a little thought, I remember the same problem I had with my p5n mobo; it might be the mobo esata controller that is not recognizing the extra MB. So I powered everything down, connected the USB cable and powered up. Sure enough, the unit under disk management came up with 2794.27 GB free. I formatted it as 2.794.27 GB and shut down the computer again so I can replug my esata cable to see if once the drive has been formatted as 2.8 TB, will it remain 2.8TB with esata.The bios reported that only a 768MB drive was attached....However windows does report under ESATA that 2.8TB is available.I'm not sure if esata is workable at this point though, even if it reports 2.8TB, it might croak after writing 768 MB. At this moment I'm filling the unit with data and keeping an eye on the both the speed and whether it can handle greater then 768MB.So now all you computer geeks know what to do with this unit when you take it home.I'll report back later on, on what happened with the fake 2.8TB esata unit. If it makes it past 768 MB.... I'll be extremely happy.last words on this unit. I've copied well over a Terabyte of data using teracopy with speeds up to 105MB/s, all verified by "beyond compare" as valid by comparing the source and the target.I did a quick chkdsk this morning, holding my breath, as I expected that it might be invalid directory structure, but chkdsk turned out fine.All in all, it is exactly what I had expected from this device; a raid device that powers up with your computer and powers down to sleep when your computer is off.This device, in terms of simplicity, feels solid; it is a hardware external esata raid. No web server, no itunes, no apps. This review was modfied by poster c 07-17-09 09:12 PM This review was modfied by poster @ 07-17-09 09:33 PM