SANS DIGITAL TowerSTOR TS2CT RAID 0, 1 2 3.5" Drive Bays USB 2.0, eSATA, Firewire 800 (1394b), Firewire 400 (1394a) 2 Bay SATA to USB 2.0 / eSATA / 1394a / 1394b RAID Enclosure

Pros: Works as advertised. Easy to set up. Attractive blue lights. Well built and has that high quality feel. Good sound dampening drive mounts.

Cons: No big deals here, but will nitpick so you know what to expect.

Installing the drives was a bit of a pain as there were sound dampeners that have to go in as well as extra care was given due to the few negatives reviews.

The blue lights, that I personally like, are BRIGHT! Putting this by your bed, or even in your bedroom is probably a bad idea.

Other Thoughts: I paid attention to the other reviews detailing the one structural weak point that may exist and avoided making the same mistake when installing my drives. To be honest, it did not look that weak, but I was careful anyway.

Pros: Works fine

Cons: Noisy, Noisy, Noisy. It only has one tiny fan that stays on constantly regardless of setting.

Other Thoughts: If one doesn't mind the noise it's fine.

Pros: So far so good. I read a lot of reviews complaining about this drive being faulty from the box. Didn't happen to me and I bought two units at once.

Drives seem to have decent performance but I am not a real technical person when it comes to hardware.

I have these drives in a Sans Digital External enclosure which uses RAID 1 (the reason why I chose a cheaper hard drive) and so far they have not passed 41 C temperature so I am pleased.

Not too noisy compared to other drives I've had.

Cons: Nothing so far. If a drive fails I'm out $100.

Other Thoughts: Drives don't seem to make a lot of noise. Come to think of it. I don't hear the arm moving very much at all. With the current set up I can manage to get 35 Mb/sec write speed with this drive.

Pros: Nice solid looking case. Buttons on face plate and everything seem very nicely built. Cables fit just right. And from what I've read with other external enclosures, this one has all the important buttons on the front face!

Getting it set up was a little funky but that attributes to my average tech knowledge I guess.

I have been running a backup image of my solid state (original purpose of this purchase). So far my drives have not gone higher than 41 C.

Cons: If you're a stickler about fan noise then you may complain but I don't mind it.

Not much direction for the average tech knowledge user.

Other Thoughts: I am excited to see how reliable RAID 1 is. Before this all I had was my main SSD so I feel much safer with my data now!

Pros: I'm running 2-2TB drives for video editing. I use the Esata port and it seems fast. Drive comes set-up as Raid 0, I use Raid 1 for back-up. Very easy to change Raid setup and drives booted right up for formatting (MAC OSX) Enclosure is quite and small. It's a pretty tight squeeze installing the drives, but they fit. Box seems to run a little warm after being on for 2 days, so we'll see how it lasts. Fan should help.

Only issue I see with this enclosure is that it is not Hot swap-able using the E-sata connection --otherwise a good enclosure.

Cons: Enclosure is not hot-swap-able using E-sata connection which means drive must be turned on before booting your computer or drive will not appear. This is only using the Esata connection--firewire and USB work fine. I lot of the raids seem to work this wasy when using Esata--not sure why?
Not a big deal-just an inconvenience. This is the Reason for 4 stars.

Other Thoughts: Price is reasonable for features

Pros: Solid enclosure, configuring was easy, I use 2 x 1TB in RAID1.

Cons: None yet

Other Thoughts: Use this drive for storing raw video and audio files. It gets dragged around and set up on location for video shoots. So far it's been a very solid box.

Pros: 1. compact
2. quiet enough
3. easy to setup
4. great home DAS for backups, redundancy

Cons: 1. takes a long time to initialize RAID 1 array with 2 new drives (once done, no problems)

Pros: It has a great simple but elegant design. Aluminum is a plus, and makes it feel very solid! The plethora of ports is helpful. The fan regulates itself based on temperature readings from the drives themselves in addition to its own thermometer. The LCD menu is simple but useful. Its ability to support 3 TB drives is very useful.

Cons: The two switch RAID mode selector on the back is a bit flimsy, at least on my unit.

Other Thoughts: A fantastic enclosure, and because of that I'll probably by their 4 bay model in the same series sometime.

Pros: Looks and feels like a quality built box, all aluminium and everything fits together nicely. Even though drive installation is easy that takes more time than setting it up. Power supply is a corded type as opposed to a 'wall wart' which is a plus in my book, looks well built as well. Doesn't seem to hinder my Mac going to sleep as a few external drives do, automatic fan speed control works, very quick spin up from power on or sleep.

Cons: The only reason it doesn't have 5 eggs is the price, a bit high for an empty box but on the other hand it is very well made so it's probably justifiable, time will tell. Possibly for some people the fairly bright blue LCD might be an annoyance if it's on a desktop.

Other Thoughts: I bought this for my iMac so FW800 is the only interface I've used. None of the boxes with FW800 get anything but mediocre reviews but so far I'm very happy with this purchase and recommend it if your looking for a 2 disk RAID 0/1 only box, no JBOD. JBOD would have been a plus for me for future use with ZFS on Solaris or Linux. I'm a Sys. Admin. by day and ZFS is 'da bomb'.