Mediasonic ProBox 4-Bays SATA Hard Drive Enclosure

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Good four bay enclosure! Ran out of bays and SATA ports in my household server. This inexpensive little box does the trick! Filled it up with 4 drives and it was prepared to go!Yes, you do will need a SATA controller with the port multiplier feature. No, numerous motherboards don't have the port multiplier feature. That's no difficulty, as Newegg sells numerous add-on cards with port multiplier. I already had a compatible add-on controller, so no trouble here. It was a bit finicky with the automatic fan. I leave it on all the time, and I have the fan set to low. I've disabled power sync and just leave the enclosure set to always on. No issues for me, because I prefer to have it on all the time in my media server. Detected automatically in Ubuntu 9.10. Saw all of my drives.Excellent price! I'm about to order another 1. I got this from an additional vendor previous, and I'm glad Newegg is carrying this item now. Thanks!

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Modest little boxStraightforward access to challenging drivesusb and esata Flimsy door that falls off.Blue lights drive me crazy at night when they're continually flashing. Wish there was a way to turn off the flashing challenging drive lights, something out of first encounters of the third kind. got it hooked up to my whs. utilizing two drives as back-ups and two as portion of the storage pool.

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four BayseSATA / USBfan control Flimsy doorpower adapter on the side instead of backpower supply faultypoor manual/tech support Finally received this. It should be a DOA item because it dies everytime I use it. it works for about 5-ten minutes then power supply becomes particularly hot and makes a hissing noise, and the unit shuts off and on once again over and over. The LED on the power supply keeps flashing. The manual is useless. Waste of a 财

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Incredibly affordable, makes redundancy considerably much easier than buying overpriced RAID5 systems for household and SMB applications. Not great, but come ON, you're not paying enough to anticipate perfection! A person downgraded this for "only" doing 34MB/s over USB. Clearly he doesn't know that's about ALL USB two CAN DO (real-globe speed). NOT fair to downgrade THIS item for that. You want high performance, use the high efficiency interface. And, 34MB/s is NOT useless, it will just about saturate a gigabit ethernet! (again, real-globe speeds, not max theoretical). If you're editing video locally or something similar, use the superior interface like you stated.

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Quiet, Appealing, 4 bays, USB and eSATA. LEDs are informative, and valuable. Energy cord could be -just- a little longer. Great addition for any of the HP mediasmart servers. As soon as you outgrow the 4 internal bays, this will double your capacity.

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This item is just working terrific since I begin employing it! works perfectly and the quality of the item is just awesome! Will purchase an additional for family members as it is a excellent gift! none

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Wasn't sure whether or not this unit was good when I bought it. However the price was right for what I needed it for, and that was just to store my hard drives I had lying around and put them them to use without buying multiple enclosures. Installing the drives were easy. The challenge came when I connected the eSata to my computer. It only found one drive at first even though my mobo was suppose to support it. I then remembered I did not set it RAID in the BIOS. Luckily I had a eSATA PCI-E card installed that was RAIDed. Plugged it into the card and rebooted the system and all the drives came up. Again, great unit for the price.

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Overall an easy to use external drive, better to have this one shot deal than to buy, say, 4 seperate external drives.

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i bought this a few days ago from ncix.com. i installed 4 2 tb wd green drives in it and it seems to work pretty good.

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I bought this case at 99$ for my 4 drives 2tb WD green and it's perfect for my own usage. Pretty silent at low speed and with my 4 drives, it always stay at slow speed. My temp are 28C idle to 38C on extreme load. Pretty good buy after all.

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This is a good option for straight mirror backup (unit on for short periods of time). I think if you left this unit on for extended periods of time, espectially with 3 to 4 drives operating, there would possibly be heat issues. There is very little space between the drives and the fan placement is questionable. If you wanted to use this box as a media center, I'd look at modding the front panel to allow more airflow over the drives as well as installing a fan that moves more cfm's.

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Great enclosure, works perfect from the very first day. Easy to install, very easy to put drives in and take out. Has 3 settings for fan speed as well as auto setting. The lowest speed is very quiet yet provides enough air to keep drives cool.

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I am now on my second enclsure,I have one running on my server (Windows Mass Storage Server 2008)in the crawlspace which I adminster remotely (WOL) and the second one is now on my main computer (Windows 7). Both boxes work right from the get go with no hassles what so ever. The server required a new esata card that supported port multiplication, but that was to be expected since I refuse to use the USB 2.0 connection due to it limitations (can't wait to get the USB 3.0 version of this thing).My main computer is a Gigabyte ga-x58a-ud5 and the esata ports support port multiplication nativly so it was a matter of just plugging it in and it worked.Unlike others, I have no problemw with heat in either box and transfer speeds are exactly what you would expect.Since some complained of it needing all four drives to function properly I installed my drives one at a time (Hot swap in AHCI mode of course) and each drive showed up immediately upon insertion, so that rules out that problem.I whole heartedly recommend this enclosure to anyone looking to add multiple hard drives to their system.

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I do not recommend this box. Next to physical shock, heat is the #1 enemy of hard drives. Given that most drives don't get banged around much, heat becomes the #1 killer of disks.This box could have been much better if they had only put vent holes in the PCB that holds the SATA connectors for the drives. Since the air coming out the back is cool, but the drives are very warm, I can only conclude that the air is going around the drives instead of over them.The method to insert  the drives is not very good - there are no real guides as such. You push the drives in and kinda 'fiddle' them into place. Having said that, the retainer clip for the drives does hold them solidly in place.The front door really helps dampen the noise but it also causes the temperature to go up. With the door closed, my 4 WD1002fbys drives run about 45C, which is too hot in my book. With the front door off, the temps drop  to around 40C, still too hot, but a lot better. All of these temps are with the fan set manually to high. I may look at modding the case to see if I can get the temps down around 30C.

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I use this for backups - as well as a place where i stream all my movies and content to my media center PC through a networked computer. I treat backups as you need at least 2 copies of something for it to be truly backed up. I've worked hard to create  my movie and TV library, so i want to protect it. I like the USB pluggable option as well ( I use ESATA,) but I've taken the machine over to my brothers house to backup family photos and some other MUST NOT LOSE information to his server box just incase my house goes up in flames.I hope it lasts a long time!

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I have two of these boxes and been swapping drives on a constant basis.Using one with USB (older computer can't handle a e-sate card) and the other with e-sata, and have swapped the boxes between the computers.The speed difference between e-sata and USB is quite large and worth getting a card with the port-multiplier for it. It's ranges from twice to three times the transfer speed.The boxes are extremely quiet (when the front door is in place) and while the hard drives are hot to the touch (while swapping), the fan has barely ever needed to go above the lower speed.Hot-swapping works fine most times, but I prefer to turn the box off when I swap the drives as a safety precaution.The handles that you have to put on the drives makes it much easier to get the drives out and assist in making sure that the drive does shake once the forward holder and door are in place.I had a question and contacted them directly and they replied within the day and were as helpful as possible.They are build very well, they feel solid and sturdy, the drives slide in very easily and plug into the ports/sockets very easily (no need to rattle/fight with the drive to get it in and connected).No matter how many drives I have in them, they work fine, only takes a few seconds to have the computer recognize the drives when the box is turned on, with either USB or e-sata.The very few times that I hot-swapped, I had a few times that the added hard drive didn't boot-up, but switching the box from USB to e-sata and back (or the reverse order), would get the drives to be recognized.For the price and features, this is the way to go for anyone with backup needs as you can start with one drive and build up as you need to. (I'd recommend going in pairs)I plan to get more of these boxes once I've finished filling all my drives.

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This external enclosure delivers as expected. It has an awesome look with a quite nice case finish. The main case is metal with a plastic front panel. The status leds are blue and might be a bit too bright in a dark room. Especially the HDD activity leds.Some people said that you need to fill in all 4 bays for the case to work. That is not correct. I started with only one drive and works just fine. Now I have 2 drives.The workmanship is quite good, no crooked parts or unfinished areas.You've got to love the small screwdriver included in the box. Also in the box there are 4 HDD handles that need to be attached to each drive. That's only for ease of pulling the HDD out of the bay.I am using it on USB, never tried eSATA. I hear that you might need port multiplier for that.From my point of view: 5 stars.

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Serves its purpose adding 4 drives to my Acer Easystore H340. Hot swap never worked so i have to have this box on before i boot up the Acer. Link to drivers in documentation is dead, So no info on this. Very touchy with powering up and down, sometimes goes off after about 3-4 secs, seems to be a esata problem with the cable not fitting in completely snug ?

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You really get what you pay for with this enclosure. I purchased this enclosure to work with my Acer Aspire Easystore nas, it works, and all the drives are visible but the enclosure itself seems to bottleneck a little bit when compared to single drive esata enclosures with the same drive. The link in the quick start guide is dead, and there is little information in the form of support on their website. I found the enclosure would not show up if it had less than 4 drives in it (I initially tried it with 3, but I cant confirm if this is operating correctly or if its an issue with my unit, as the manufacturer's site had such little supporting documentation.Bottom line: it works, its cheap, its not the best.

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The cheapest and simplest way to house 4 drives (esata or usb) that there is, bar none.It's not perfect, but you can't argue with the price and functionality.Note: Mediasonic is marketed under the "Hotway" brand in Australia and as "Corega" in Japan. This review was modfied by poster t 12-06-09 06:44 PM This review was modfied by poster @ 12-06-09 06:18 PM

Comment:
This is a nice looking, simple unit. To install drives you simply screw one of the holders into the front of the drive and slide it in. You can use any combination of bays you want. The fan has three manual speeds (or you can use Auto mode which toggles between the three) and is fairly quiet. However the PCB sits right in front of it and covers about 95% of the airflow path. They should've put the fan in the side or at the top with drives mounted vertically.The power, sync and interface buttons needs to be held down for 3 seconds. I can understand 1 second or even 2 seconds in case you accidentally touch it, but 3 seconds is excessive. Using the sync feature you can set it to turn on, turn off, or go into standby with the system.For anyone who claims that the port multiplier requirement is a negative, get your head checked. Putting in 4 different eSATA ports is expensive and messy, so yeah PM is the way to go. And yes it hotswaps fine as long as your system is running in AHCI mode - if you don't know what is, stick to USB - since you're not a power user you don't need the extra speed.I'm using the enclosure with a Syba SD-SA2PEX-2E PCI-E controller card ($20), 3 x 1TB Seagate/Samsung hard drives and Windows 7 x64. This combo also works with XP SP3. This review was modfied by poster @ 07-24-09 09:18 PM

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I bought one of these so I could get the hard drives out of my Antec 300 to make room for a GTX 260. It currently holds 4 1TB WD Green drives full of media. I like this thing because I can take it with me to a friend's house, plug it into their pc and play movies off it. When I plug it in the hard drives show up exactly as if they were still inside the computer. This is the cheapest 4 bay enclosure I found but it's absolutely perfect. When I fill these 4 drives I'll buy some more and another enclosure for sure.

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Overall, I am impressed with this enclosure, this thing is great. I use it to back up my raid 0 drives and it works great. Highly recommended :)

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We added this to our data server using the areca 1300-4e controller card. Works great! No problems with heat. We have lots of room for adding more drive space as can add 3 more units for a total of 16 Sata drives. Using 1Tb drives will allow for 16Tb of drive space before adding another conteroller card.So far, so good. We like the speed we see on the network, and we are getting more units ready for later this year.

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This is a great drive enclosure, i use it for my backups with a mix of different drives. The front 'safety cover' is a little flimsy but workable. The fan is pretty good for an enclosure (i've heard some real vacuums on some enclosures).I don't have a sata multiple compatable chipset on my motherboard so i can't comment about the e-sata but usb works fine for my needs.