Sans Digital 8-Bay eSATA RAID 0/1/10/5/JBOD Tower Storage Enclosure w/ 6G PCIe Card TR8M+B (Black)

Pros: very quiet. nice lighting.

Cons: cheaply made. couldn't get card to function correctly under ubuntu with a pci to pci-adapter card.

Other Thoughts: decent start case for those looking to delv into the world of raid.

Pros: Like I said before, the box itself is great. eSATA with port multipliers is a great thing.

Cons: Everything else that comes with the box is apparently junk.
I had problems with the RocketRaid card and ended up buying a Silicon Image non-raid card to get it to work with FreeBSD initially. A couple of weeks ago, I had problems with drives starting to drop. It turns out the cables they include are junk and easily lose connection. So, I bought a new eSATA cable from Cables To Go and now things are stable again.

Other Thoughts: Throw away everything that comes with this except the enclosure.

Manufacturer Response:

Thank you for purchasing our product.

The unit's eSATA controller card support Linux. At the same time, there are difference version of BIOS for Linux/BSD specific application. Please consult with our technical support for solutions.

Please contact us by calling 1-800-980-1988 for technical support if you have further questions. You can also contact us at tech@sansdigital.com.

Pros: cheap at the time of purchase; slim design; easy installation.

Cons: slow fan; no ventilation; overheating

Other Thoughts: This is a little update to the review I wrote in April. Still had problems with the drives losing connection during file transfers. Increasing the airflow to the tower helped but another problem I had was the esata card was also overheating. I have a geforce 560ti card that was blowing hot air unto the card causing it to overheat. Solved the problem by sandwiching the card between two slot fans. I've been running file transfers for the past few days to and from the enclosure and it seems to have solved the situation.

Pros: Excellent cost for mass storage
Faily easy to get setup
Compact sleek case

Cons: Initialization required for pre-encryption disks (explained below)
Air-flow design

Other Thoughts: I bought the unit with a future pair in mind (still the plan). I've done RAID in various implementations; to many issues and points of failure. So, I decided to go old school; complete redundant hardware /w replication software (Individual JBOD disks syncronized to a second unit - complete fault-tolerance). This allowed me to go from WD Black to Green (Black is the only way to go with an "all eggs in one basket" approarch). Anyways, once I figured out the drives have to been initialized first then full disk encrypted (TrueCrypt) my disks now show up. BIG PROBLEM: Cooling - The unit is so compact, has a faily quiet and low CFM fan, and the sleek door really impact its ability to move air. "Heat is the silent killer!" I agree with other posts here that you need to do somthing or drive will die unless your unit is sitting in a 65 degree room. I'm going with a high CFM fan in the back even though another low unit in the front would be best (keeping the sleek).

Pros: Works as described

Cons: The fan went out in about 6 months, had to replace it. The front cover blocks the air flow. Wound up removing the cover and it dropped the drive temp by 30 Deg.

Other Thoughts: Would have been better if they left the screen on the front cover. A better fan would be nice considering the money that I paid for the enclosure.

Pros: Holds 8 drives. Relatively inexpensive.

Cons: I had a prior generation of this unit that was riddled with problems. After 13 months the PCIe card died on the unit while I was expanding the RAID 5 to add in one additional 2TB drive. Since the card died during the expansion process, I lost 10TB worth of data.

The new version of this unit has been "improved." So I purchased a new unit and began re-acquiring the data for the last 6 weeks and have not completed yet. Now the new unit's PCIe card just died within 5 weeks. Just long enough that I can no longer return it. My past dealings with Sans Digitals customer service was horrible. I expect the the same will happen now when I try and return the card for a replacement.

Best of luck, if you decide to purchase one of these units...

Other Thoughts: My bad for buying the "new design" has actually been improved.

Manufacturer Response:

Thank you for purchasing our product.

For the review, there are not many information about PCIe's controller card issues. Please contact us, and we will be able to service you. In the case of RMA replacement is needed, the data will be able to transfer to the new replacement card and the data will not be lost.

Please contact our technical support at tech@sansdigital.com or 1-800-980-1988 for further support. We can help to resolve this issues for you.

Pros: First off, Newegg needs to get rid of the "Tech Knowledge" level as it's completely arbitrary. Almost everyone who's popped a cover thinks he's a guru. I have a computer science degree and have been building computers since you had to flip dip switches to set your BIOS interrupts. That's my Tech level.

That being said, this enclosure is fantastic especially for the price. The port multipliers work without any problems and I run this case hard. People having trouble are most likely getting stuck on the RR622 controller card which is.. not so good.

I'm using this as both my data and media storage. I have a stack of Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB drives driven by FlexRAID in single parity.

When that's used up I'll toss the RR622 for a 4 SATA controller card that doesn't pretend to be something it's not, get another of these enclosures, and run a double parity on both enclosures together (when that's used up I imagine I'll donate the enclosures and switch to racks).

Cons: RocketRAID 622 is fake-RAID; meaning it is software RAID (bad software RAID in this case) on what would normally just be a controller card. A real hardware RAID is essentially its own little computer and they are NOT cheap.

Go to SansDigital support website, find your tower, download/install the non-RAID firmware and non-RAID drivers, and run a software RAID.

I'm not downgrading my rating because I bought an enclosure not a RAID card; nor did I have any delusions that a free RAID card was real hardware RAID. It's just a starting point which is better than nothing for most people.

Other Thoughts: The fan is LOUD. I even replaced it with a COUGAR CF-V12HPB which is pretty quiet by itself. It seems the shape of the vent in the case is what makes the noise. A little tweaking should yield results but I expect I'll be using a PWM controller to keep it quiet at night.

For a home-use storage solution this set up can't be beat.

Pros: cheap at the time of purchase; slim design; easy installation.

Cons: slow fan; no ventilation; overheating

Other Thoughts: So when I bought this thing and initially only used 4 drives in the unit I had no problems. However, I eventually filled it with 8 2tb drives and I began to see the problem with the drives failing during sustained large file transfers. I setup two RAID 0 drives 4 hard drives each. I must have troubleshot this bad boy for a good week before I noticed the problem. During very large file transfers the hard drives would stop responding and the unit would begin flashing the corresponding lights on the front of the unit as if trying to find the hard drives again. I've seen this behavior before with drives overheating. At first i just popped the sides on the unit and all my problems disappeared. Even all the lights on the front were lit up. That includes the PC Link lights. I did not like the look though so i put the sides back on and just opened the front and stuck a fan in front of the unit. Sans Digital, don't bother responding. I am happy with my workaround and the unit.

Pros: Cheap

Cons: I tried using this in an un-raid setup to access eight 3TB HDDs. After going through the installation my pc recognized all 8 HDDs. However, after about 3 minutes the card began a continuous, deafening beep. I tried to update the driver to the windows 7 64 bit (remove beeping) version with no luck. I don't feel like calling technical support about a card that's clearly very cheap and doesn't work for a lot of people.

Manufacturer Response:

Thank you for purchasing our products.

Non-RAID or JBOD of 8 of 3TB hard drives is supported. The TR8M+B requires to use with port multiplier controller card to work with all 8 drives. Because the bundled controller card is intend to work with RAID application, it will beeps when there are drives removed. There are JBOD only version of the driver not only remove the beep, but also handle JBOD without any setup.

Please contact our technical support at tech@sansdigital.com or 1-800-980-1988 and we can resolve your issues.

Pros: Worked instantly after installing software that comes with it. With no configuration at all, drives work as JBOD, and setting up mirroring on selected channels took 2 seconds. I am using drives of multiple size, manufacturer, and a mix of green/black drives. Not having an issue with any of them at all. Also not sure what the deal is with the bad reviews on here. This is the best thing I've purchased in a long time, and it's something I've needed forever. Thanks to the recent $100+ price drop, I went for it, and I'm very glad I did. 8 drives w/ 2 cables solved all of my problems. (I had 3 drives that I had to swap into a top-loading external enclosure when I needed to use them)

Cons: Would have liked the option to turn off the blue light on the fan. Not worth taking an egg off for though. The fan is huge, cool, and quiet. Just not a fan of the neon lights.

Other Thoughts: Looks awesome next to my Antec P183 case, which looks identical, only 2x the size.