Sans Digital TR5M TowerRAID Hard Drive Enclosure - 5 Bay, 3.5, SATA to eSATA, Raid 0, 1, 1+0, 5, JBOD

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This is the second RAIDTower I have purchased, very happy with the first tower. Unfortunately, received this unit damaged. After several weeks and more than a dozen phone calls, still have not been emailed the packing details to return.

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What I liked about it was it just worked without and special utilities or setup. I put in 5 Hard drives, plugged it into the server, went to Disk manager in control panel, selected all 5 disks, and created a RAID in 10 minutes. I didn't choose Quick Format, so formatting took 72 hours though.

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I bought 1, with 5* 1.5TB (5.45TB usable in RAID5), i'm using win server 2003 64bits to create and manage my raid, no problem at all.

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Bought 2 and happy w/ value/features. 5 Seagate 1.5TB drives each enclosure. RAID creation/formatting (7.5TB total, 6TB useable in RAID5 config) takes about 2 days. Don't try to create a RAID unit and immediately format it, wait until creation is done, about 1.2 days or so. Then format 1 drive at a time. If unit creation fails more than 2x or format stays at, say, 25% for more than 1 hr the drive is likely bad - had 1 bad drive and it did this. Using WinXP32 you'll have to break up 6TB array into 4 groups (WinXP64 of course is fine with 6TB drive). The unit creation software is clunky - can't type fractional TB (i.e. 1.99 TB) but typing 2TB exceeds Win32 limit. Used 1TB for RAID groups 0/1, HALF for RG2 (creates 1.72TB drive), MAX for RG3 (creates 1.72TB drive with remaining space). Settings:8KB chunk,Parity RAID(means RAID 5),5 members(drives),maximize I/O performance. Enable Advanced RAID Features in config menu 1ST. Great unit,6TB of RAID5 capacity for $881.93 incl. ship.($147/TB).