Sans Digital 5-Bay eSATA RAID 0/1/10/5/JBOD Tower Storage Enclosure w/ 6G PCIe Card TR5M+B (Black)

Pros: OK

Cons: Did not receive the promised rebate. It was submitted on time with all documentation.

Pros: Price, but you get what you pay for
Windows GUI to control the RAID card. I liked that.
Very polite support tech's at Sans Digital

Cons: Apparently not compatible with all systems.
SANS Digital does not offer refunds for equipment that doesn't work.
Causes BSOD's

Other Thoughts: I'm sure a Sans Digital rep is going to jump on and say how they tried to help me sort out my issues, and they would be right. They will also say that it must have been caused by an incompatibility with my system, which makes no sense at all.

It all started about a month after I purchased the chassis from New Egg. I also purchased 5 - 2TB hard drives that I intended to run in a RAID5 Array. Brought it home, set it up and the first thing that happened was the array would lock up when I was trying to transfer my data from my backup to the new chassis/array. It just constantly froze when trying to dump all the data. So I was forced to move all the data over, nearly folder by folder. Very frustrating.

Once I finally got the data moved over, and after a month of operation, my system (A server 2008 Standard on a HP Workstation - high end PC) started to experience BSOD's (Blue Screen of Death). I contacted support and dealt with an amazing tech, who was patient and polite, but could never resolve the issue and refused to refund me the money I spent on the chassis in a return for refund.

After several months of fighting, changing chassis's and RAID cards (one card didn't even load in my system), finally they sent me a new backplane and new RR620 card, but once again I experienced another BSOD. I will never again buy another Sans Digital piece of technology. I will save some money and try something else, but I won't ever go back. Not for me, nor any of my corporate level clients. Take some advice from an IT guy, look elsewhere for an external chassis. Don't waste the time and frustration.

Pros: I did not use the included eSATA card. I'm using an Addonics card which has no built-in RAID functionality.

All five drives are accessible by FreeNAS. I created a striped mirror vdev zpool (RAID 10) with 1 hotspare with no issue.

Cons: This enclosure does not support SATA III (6Gbps).

I should have paid more attention to the item description. Despite it coming with a (worthless) 6 Gbps eSATA card it will not support 6 Gbps.

Other Thoughts: Again, this enclosure does NOT support SATA III. It will only operate at 3Gbps.

Pros: It holds 5 Disks

Cons: It is extremely slow, hangs Windows 7 64bit, it can also blue screen (crash) Windows 7 64 bit system log only reports "targeginstanceloadpercentage > 99" In other words the device is hanging up full buffers and seems to have no time out for it to recover from the error. This is a constant problem when coping files to the array. Very large files and folders with a large number of files hang it.

Other Thoughts: This thing needs a better Raid card!

Manufacturer Response:

Thanks you for purchasing our product.

Please contact Sans Digital for updated driver and firmware package. We understand some of the issues could cause by desktop hard drives, as well as outdated driver and firmware package.

Please contact us by calling 1-800-980-1988 for technical support and our engineer will try to resolve it over the phone. You can also contact us at tech@sansdigital.com for e-mail supports.

Pros: This is a follow-up to my earlier review:

Sans Digital allowed me to RMA the HighPoint RR622 cards in exchange for Silicon Image 3132 and they're all working fine now.

BTW: I'm using WD20EFRX NASware (Red) drives, so this was _not_ a consumer-grade drive issue.

Cons: In further testing, I found that the RR622 cards can work OK if you only populate the enclosure with 4 drives (but if you're going to do that, you might as well just buy the 4-bay enclosure).

As soon as you pop in the 5th drive, the RR622 misbehaves badly.

Other Thoughts: Kudos to Alfred at Sans Digital who provided fast and professional support.

All 5 drives in each enclosure are working fine now and I would definitely buy again with the Silicon Image cards.

Pros: Port #1 ~ #4 works.

Cons: Port #5 does NOT work!
Port #5 cannot recognize any disk!
Ask for a replacement.

Manufacturer Response:

Thank you for purchasing our products.

If the unit works with the first 4 slot but not the fifth slots, please contact us directly to walk via the trouble shooting over the phone. We will be able to provide a solutions for you.

If you are having problem on the unit, please contact us by calling 1-800-980-1988 for technical support and our engineer will try to resolve it over the phone. You can also contact us at tech@sansdigital.com for e-mail supports.

Pros: The Sans Digital enclosure is easy to assemble works great. It has status LEDs on the front panel so you can easily see which drives are active.

Cons: The HighPoint RR622 eSATA controller is pure junk. It uses an old/buggy Marvell 88SE9123/9128 chipset which is known for poor performance and spurious resets. With either the HighPoint RAID setup or JBOD plus software RAID, the result is the same...RR622 card resets itself under heavy load, often leading to a degraded or even corrupt array.

Replace RR622 with Silicon Image 3132 and all is well.

Other Thoughts: For the price paid, I'm happy with the Sans Digital enclosure itself and don't mind throwing the HighPoint RR622 controller into the junk drawer.

Manufacturer Response:

Thank you for purchasing Sans Digital product.

The poor performance and spurious resets are cause by hard drives selections. We support RAID or Enterprise HDD for RAID application. At the same time, we also support Sil 3132 based controller for using with this products.

If you are having problem on the unit, please contact us by calling 1-800-980-1988 for technical support and our engineer will try to resolve it over the phone. You can also contact us at tech@sansdigital.com for e-mail supports.

Thank you.

Pros: - 5 SATA drive bays on a single eSATA connection
- Hot-swap capability
- Easy to add and remove a hard drive
- Front door / cover to hide drives
- Minimal lights (not lit up like Vegas) :)
- Comes with an eSATA controller

Cons: - A drive rail/bay/tray must be attached with screws to the hard drive to insert the drive into the enclosure. I'd prefer a tool-less tray like what my HP uses but I don't plan to add/remove my drives very often.
- No USB connection. I knew this before I bought it so it really isn't a Con. However, the cost of the eSATA + USB 3.0 drive is like $100+ more. Crazy.

Other Thoughts: - I loaded this enclosure up with 5 x WD 3.0TB Red NAS drives. Quiet, cool, and fast operation. Connected via the eSATA connection (only connection) to my HP EX490 file server and I had no problems at all.
- You must ensure that your host computer (host eSATA controller) supports port multiplication or you will only see the bottom single drive. My laptop is this way - No fault of this enclosure. If you have a PC, you can use the included controller that will allow you to see all the drives. I did not need to use the included eSATA controller.

Pros: Easy install and works great with my WHS v1 HP EX495 server. Installed and recognized by my EX495 server in less than 15 minutes. Compact form factor, I was surprised it was smaller than my EX495.

Cons: Fans a little bit loud. During standby mode the fans still running, i hope there is a way to stop it.

Other Thoughts: I needed to expand the storage capacity of my EX 495 WHS v1 server so i went with the Sans TR5M+. Loved the compact size and easy installation. I have Lightsout on my EX495 so it has timed turn on and off periods also powers on if one of the client PCs are powered on, the TR5M does go to sleep and syncs with my EX495 on wakes and sleeps. However, when the TR5M is in sleep mode the fans still runnning. I'm trying to figure out a way that the fans stops running when it goes to sleep.

Pros: I love this Storage, easy to install, awesome speed. Just love it

Cons: None