Product ReviewsSANS DIGITAL TowerRAID TR4M-BP 4 Bay eSATA Port Multiplier JBOD Tower (w/ eSATA Card Bundle) (Black)
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With 20 User Reviews
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 Rating: Review Date: 06/25/13 |
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Rating: Review Date: 05/19/13 |
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I like this unit! Assembly was painless and it looks great..... (not excellent due to the fact I'm not a big fan of "piano black")Fantastic setup possibilities and will see legacy drives if you have them. Excellent speed for external eSATA making use of four 3g/s SATA II in RAID 1ǖ...... JBOD is a fantastic choice as well. Lengthy boot time as the BIOS loads...... what's up with that?Fan is a tiny loud, could have been temp sensitive so it wasn't running full tilt at all instances....... Or just a bigger slower fan for the identical air flow at reduce db.On/Off switch feels affordable, lighted fan tends to make me wonder who this is targeted at, Pros or Gamers?Windows utility computer software could be superior......... Loaded this with 4 Seagate refurbs and got 2tb of eSATA for low cost..... Nice!I got this when the Egg had a sale on them, Promo code made it worth my even though, not positive if I would have paid complete pop..... |
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Rating: Review Date: 04/25/13 |
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Initially I want to say that Sans Digital's technical assistance is totally top rated-notch. If you email them for aid, they get back to you promptly and with excellent, thorough data.The external RAID device is exceptional, and uncomplicated to set up when you figure out what you need to do. My current setupɈ x 1TB SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s connected by means of eSATA cable to supplied RAID card.Raid ten, 2TB size, 64kb sector size, default strip sizeCurrent Overall performance: 143mb/sec avg transfer price, 10ms access timeThese outcomes are superb and I highly recommend this set up. Redundancy and overall performance can't get a lot greater on an external RAID Array. Initial set-up documentation isn't incredibly good. Supplied CD isn't clear as to what you require to set up and what you need to have to do. If you get stuck, their technical assistance can help you out. |
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Rating: Review Date: 04/05/13 |
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Gloss piano black finish, anti-scratch cover for shipping/assembly, RAID ǗǛቦ/SPAN/JBOD, hot spare/hot swap, HiPoint RocketRAID 622, Internet management interface, ORLM/OLCE, 80mm fan/vented door in front gets great airflow, a single RR622 will help two of these enclosures. Slow initialization of the array, but that's to be expected. I have four old 1TB Hitachi HDS721010KLA330 drives set up in RAID5 k block size, write through cache) and get a solid 106 MB/s write and 143 MB/s read utilizing ATTO Benchmark. Temps are cool sufficient, but thinking about replacing fan with greater CFM. Fan is quiet and has blue LEDs, but I reduce them out as they had been as well vibrant for my tastes. |
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Rating: Review Date: 02/05/13 |
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Quiet operation, Good layout for drive lights, energy lights. Involves eSata raid card with two external eSata ports, eSata cable. I have set up this box for a client with three two tb drives (Seagate 5400 rpm drives, Windows 7) Installation was simple. Raid box is controlled thru connecting to port with net browser. Raid five setup of drives takes approx 14 hours. Most absolutely worth the money. The computer software documentation could be clearer. No deal breakers correct now. Unit is nonetheless initializing the drives. Im impressed with this unit. I think any person seeking for more advanced storage than a external drive would be rather delighted with this. Of course, Coming from the Jersey warehouse the delivery was quick from newegg! I took 1 star off simply because of the sketchy documentation of the install approach. But generally you will first set up hardware, then set up the driver for the rocket raid card, Then immediately after reboot set up the web management software. Webmanagement computer software situated in "Accessories" menu. |
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Rating: Review Date: 10/31/12 |
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Value was great CAD119 w/free shipping. Great Buyer support e-mail over the telephone. Tech person was knowledgeable, patient and corteous My computer system Dell with Q955 Quad Core Intel chip six GIG of RAM supports SataIII 6GB/s. Im using a WD Sata III Caviar Black 1TB 64Mb cache at 7200 rpm on JBOD array with nominal speed of 6Gb/s. The enclosure's Controller Card is also stated to be 6Gb/ps capable. The actual transfer speed in between enclosure and laptop or computer is nowhere close to the minimum 500 Mb/s that specs claim to be. Who is not delivering? Exactly where is the bottleneck? Probably the Enclosure. Manufacturer Response:Thank you for buying our item. Please note the transfer rate of the unit is about 200MB/s in RAID and 150MB/s in RAID five. Please realize that 6Gb/s hard drives is about 100MB/s efficiency in essentially read create. Only in the cache read create will capable to over 100MB/s, due the the mechanical style of the disk. Your efficiency may also limited by the the speed of the PCIe slot. Please make certain employing PCIe 2. for optimal overall performance. If you need even greater efficiency, you can pick TR4X-BHA, which supply even greater throughput, reach the about 300MB/s in RAID and RAID 5. TR4X-BHA employing high bandwidth cabling (SFF-8088 or mini-SAS), supplying much more direct and larger efficiency. Please speak to us at 1-800-980-1988 or e-mail us at tech@sansdigital.com, and we will be capable to support you out.External Link(s): TR4M-BP Overall performance Web page| TR4X-BHA Item Web page| |
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Rating: Review Date: 10/08/12 |
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I bought this to function with my HP Mediasmart EX490 - operating Windows Residence Server. I just plugged it in utilizing the included eSata cable to the server's eSata port multiplier. It integrated seamlessly with no setup at all, and properly doubles the quantity of drives I can utilised with the server with no slow down (unlike making use of bottle-necking USB 2. ports). The only situation I had initially, was creating positive I had place the drives in the proper slots. The documentation isn't all that clear, but drives need to be added with the lowest physical address first or there will be complications with WHS seeing the new drive. For the cost this can't be beat. It's also negative Mediasmart servers are getting discontinued. HP's jumping off the bandwagon as Microsoft dumps the drive extender (DE) technology from its next release of WHS. I'm hoping with the added storage available with the enclosure, I'll be capable to preserve my server up in operating for the subsequent three-5 years. The vivid blue LED fan in the back annoyingly required. |
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Rating: Review Date: 09/26/12 |
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-Included port-multiplier/RAID card operates great when configured appropriately, uncomplicated to operate. Powerful array of features; this point will email you when a hard drive fails! -Great for property/media servers. I set mine up in RAID5 with 4x1.5TB drives, runs like a champ.-Manual is superb and detailed.-A second tower can be added to the second port on the RAID card, enabling you to expand your RAID to 8 drives! -General quality of the enclosure is low - cheap plastic, and situation has to be removed to add/remove drives (secured by means of thumbscrew)-Blue LED 80mm fan is sort of tacky seeking, I might replace it. Make positive you install the correct driver! There are separate ones for JBOD and RAID0-5, I was making use of mine in JBOD initially and didn't understand I needed to reinstall with the correct driver to convert to RAID5 (all the options to initialize and so forth showed up, just threw a useless "failed" message when I went to initialize the array). All superior now although!Make positive to configure your sector size to 2k or 4k if you're utilizing XP or Server 2003 32 bit - otherwise only two TB of the volume can be accessed! Takes about 12 hours to initialize the raid, so you truly don't want to get stuck doing it twice (like I did). |
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Rating: Review Date: 09/26/12 |
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Great web interface allows for effortless setup.Easy to install drives and really quiet. Boot method is incredibly, quite slow. I am transferring 98.3GB from an internal RAID0 array to this external RAID5 array proper now and am averaging about 115MBps. I don't consider that is as well bad. |
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Rating: Review Date: 09/03/12 |
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Nicely constructed unit, very quiet, good potential. Does not operate. Hoping vendor can resolve challenge. Unit hangs with error message on startup "Not enough space to copy PCI selection ROM 00Ʌfᚪ". I am booting from 1 of my internal drives. Right after this message I finish up with a wrecked BootMgr on my boot drive. Manufacturer Response:Thank you for buying our item. "Not enough space to copy PCI option ROM 00Ʌfᚪ" is a known issue connected to resources allocation. You can try to disable unused resource, such as RAID, serial port or sound card. If it still fail, you can disable the int13 and EDBA in the BIOS for controller. Please contact us at 1-800-980-1988 or e-mail us at tech@sansdigital.com for detail instruction of how to disable individuals capabilities. |
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Rating: Review Date: 09/01/12 |
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I liked the first box so significantly I purchased yet another one when NewEgg had the subsequent sale on this item. I am now running two of these RAID Towers off a single controller. So now I have one particular spare controller board. The mechanical style of this box is simply excellent. It genuinely is a work of art. And the performance is quite great. I have two WD two TB disk drives and two Seagate 1.5 TB drives in a single box. I have two two TB drives in the second box in addition to a 1 TB drive. The fourth slot is empty at the moment. Each boxes stay fairly cool with the enclosed fan. When transferring large blocks of information of greater than 1 TB, it maxes out at about 55 MBytes/second. The controller card adds a full 30 seconds to the boot time each and every time I turn on the computer. It is scanning the box to figure out what sort of disks I have installed - I guess. I have a extremely high efficiency Intel I7 program with an Intel SSD boot disk and a four TB Raid inside. And this turkey causes the boot time to enhance a complete half minute every single time I energy-up. I don't like the boot time raise at all. But the moment it finishes its setup, it runs rapid. It appears like this box could don\'t forget what's installed locally to steer clear of the added half minute boot time. Just install a small flash memory and compare what's inside versus what's in flash memory. If it doesn't match, they you know the configuration has changed. |
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Rating: Review Date: 07/06/12 |
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InexpensiveCompactDecent speedVery good alternativesSupports "Legacy" drives (individual volumes)Future expandability with on the web expansionBreaks 2TB limit even with XP 32 bit (albeit there could be problems with some cloning variety software program, simply because this demands virtual sectors > 512B). No latches for inserting/removing drives. If you move drives round a lot (as I have been while aggregating lots of misc drive into one particular major RAID), there's a lot of thumbscrewing (but not tools required) to add and get rid of drives; but that's the nature of a low-cost enclosure like this and a really sensible tradeoff so no eggs off. The moment you are stable, this won't happen generally. Or you could skip the thumbscrews if you tape handle loops on the drives for removal and don't move the enclosure about (using connector friction to hold them in spot).Speed in RAID5 has been OK but not wonderful; but I'm making use of it on an older slower machine as file server, a much better CPU would probably be significantly faster, as might RAID0 or RAID1. So far RAID five with four x Samsung HD204UI on Win XP 32 bit is working well, using 4KiB logical sectors via included Highpoint software to break 2TiB limit (and match underlying Advanced Format sectors).Have four x 1 TB "legacy" (individual) drives in second enclosure driven by similar card (Seagate & Hitachi).Tip: If you want to reuse drives from a RAID array, "Delete" the array before repartitioning/reformatting as individual drives.E mail buyer assistance was friendly and helpful. |
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Rating: Review Date: 06/10/12 |
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Easy setup. Fairly quiet. Poor documentation.I'm operating JBOD for an HTPC setup.The corporation actually needs to triage what operates and what doesnt with this unit. I had various SATA drives which had been not recognized by the enclosure. Turns out that they had been just 'too old', as my newer SATA drives worked fine. That's an annoyance, but I'm fine with it. Nonetheless, I had to figure this out for myself.If I attempt to transfer additional than 500mb at a time, the enclosure 'resets itself' and enters what looks like an initialization loop. Shutting down the unit is the only remedy at that point.I've tried contacting tech assistance 3 occasions now and every time I have to leave a message. Poor customer service. Overall pretty disappointed with this unit, provided all of the good responses. Planning a desperate RMA attempt with newegg if I cant get some aid from Sans by the end of the week. Manufacturer Response:Thank you for buying our merchandise.Please give us more detail on the challenging drives used. There is "virtually" no limitation on what SATA drives. We tested from 80GB to most recent 3TB. Please contact us at 1-800-980-1988 or e-mail us at tech@sansdigital.com to resolve your present problems. |
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Rating: Review Date: 05/19/12 |
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Port multiplier, so much less cabling; wonderful for set-ups where you have a lot of storage but no locality of access. Compact unit, considerably nicer than the SCSI five.25" chassis I've been converting for FireWire or eSATA port multiplier. Stupid blue LED rear fan. It has a front door like a hotswap chassis, but the drives screw in with thumbscrews and you need to have to take the cover off to modify them. None of that is why I took an egg away, even though.The bundled RR622 card is garbage. Effectively, maybe it isn't, but HighPoint doesn't have correct open supply drivers for Linux, they use binary blobs. And they don't operate under high write load; the NCQ gets corrupt and whole drives get kicked off the complete bus. The unit functions quite properly with the AHCI SATA controller on my motherboard (ASUS M4A77TD PRO). It's truly just the bundled card that let me down; I'm truly working with the bundled card with a various port multiplier enclosure, and some swift searching on my signs and symptoms shows that I'm not the only a single with complications with the High Point proprietary drivers. (Which they contact "Open Supply", in spite of like pre-compiled .o files.)Never obtain hardware that wants software from a hardware corporation.... |
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Rating: Review Date: 04/27/12 |
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Performs i believe All 4 controllers failed at the identical time after a handful of hours of use. soon after a series of reboots etc it was unresponsive. i unplugged it and let it sit for a couple of minutes then plugged it back in. havent had a issue in about 2 days.. 5400rpm 2 tbs x4 in a RAID five write at about 60MBps with this. Read speed is about 67.5MBps. I wanted to put that below cons but decided my alternative in inexpensive drives played a portion as effectively. |
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Rating: Review Date: 03/19/12 |
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QuicklyGood valueComes with RAID cardCompatibleHot Swappable None that I observed yet I am going to be acquiring four a lot more of these units. I wish I could connect 2 computer systems to 1 at a time. |
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Rating: Review Date: 12/27/11 |
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The package from newegg wasn't empty I received a defective product. I don't know what the failure rate is, for me it feels like 100%. I have been operating with consumer support for 40 days now ࿈ days without access to my storage is really a painful expertise to say the least) and I nonetheless do not have a working item. It has been 14 days because I have final heard from their consumer support relating to my open trouble ticket (after I confirmed my return shipping tracking quantity) even though they quote 3 days as being the maximum response time. The item is poor, the customer support is worse. I will never ever acquire from this corporation once more; regardless of them obtaining good evaluations this mess is not for me. Manufacturer Response:I think you have refer to various company or technical support. If the dilemma is on the unit, you need to have received a replacement unit under our warranty policy. Our standard response time is 1 day turnaround, and you can reach us for e-mail, telephone and forum. Please get in touch with us at 1-800-980-1988 or e-mail us at tech@sansdigital.com, and we can resolve your troubles. |
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Rating: Review Date: 08/20/11 |
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- Plugged in four various WD drives as a JBOD and they worked seamlessly and needed no setup (drives were initialized previously)- eSata transfer speeds are wonderful for transferring massive mkv files- At present utilizing 2x 2tb, 1x 1.5tb, and 1x 500gb; - Enclosure design looks excellent, - Fan does a fantastic job keeping the drives cool; despite the fact that it is a bit loud; - No selection to turn off the fan's blue led, seriously bright in a dark room; This is the reason it lost an egg;- Have to open the outer case to get rid of the topmost drive - Did not get to test the eSata card, desktop had two esata ports with port multiplier |
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Rating: Review Date: 07/30/11 |
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I purchased EIGHT of these, Four Lenovo TS200v's and 36 Spinpoint F4 2TB drives for a small media project. I typically use Promise but this config seemed fine, how else to get ㅾTB w/ hosts for under 7K? Nicely, data initializes fine but may have intermittent issues under Windows 2008 R2 x64. Configured 2X 4 drive RAID5 and was able to specify 4k sector size in raid mgmt. (Took about a full day to total fyi) Then in windows storage manager setup with 64k allocation unit... random failures following 100-300GB xfer. Trying once again with 4k allocation size, see if that's any better. (so far so very good btw)Also, obtaining 70-120MB/s xfer Read/Write average with RAID5 or 10. That's enough for me. With this xfer concern resolved. None actually. |
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Rating: Review Date: 05/06/11  |
Cons:
Only esata connector and a poor design as the connect will disconnect in the case and you will have to manually take the case apart to put back in place so the esata will be read n connected
Pros: Great case with lots of air flow, easy access to slide sata drives in Comment:
Had this case for 2 years and over all has been no problem.I bought it for an external archiving unit for photo n video for my laptop. USB 3.0 wasn't conirmed to be released yet n esata was the only worthwhile connecor for my needs.My laptop at the time had a buit in esata port however it is not, nor are most esata laptop connectors a port multiplier to enable you to detect mre than 1 hard drive.I had to purchae an express card esata port multiplier card so that my laptop would read more than 1 drive. Minor inconvenience n a lesson learned.A selling this unit now since I upgraded to an external usb 3.0 4 hd tower.Those interested in mine feel free to eail uncle_booboo c yahoo . com |
The mechanical design of this box is extremely good. It genuinely looks like a perform of art. And the functionality is rather fantastic. I have two WD 2 TB disk drives and two Seagate 1.5 TB drives in the box. It stays cool with the enclosed fan. When transferring massive blocks of data of higher than 1 TB, it maxes out at about 55 MBytes/second. It adds a full 30 seconds to the boot time every single time I turn on the computer. It is scanning the box to ascertain what type of disks I have installed - I guess. I have a incredibly high overall performance Intel I7 method with an Intel SSD and a 4 TB Raid . And this turkey causes the boot time to boost a full half minute. I don't like that. It seems like this box could remember what's installed locally to stay away from the added half minute boot time.