Sans Digital 8-Bay SAS/SATA RAID 5 Tower Storage Enclosure w/ 6G PCIe 2.0 x8 TR8X+BP (Black)

Pros: Solid unit. I have a Windows Home Server 2011 build and a HighPoint RocketRaid 2722 connecting to the enclosure. I have been running 8 2TB WD drives. I have the drives in a RAID5 configuration, with a total of 16TB, 14TB used in the RAID5, and 12.7TB available in Windows. I had one drive give me sector errors (drive was still under warranty), so I replaced the drive and it rebuilt the RAID with no problems. The Sans Digital was a replacement for a different 8-bay enclosure that used port multiplication. I purchased that other unit because it was much cheaper than this, but I had numerous problems with that unit and ended up getting rid of it. I think port multiplication was the culprit and I would stay away from products that connect so many drives using that method. The Sans Digital unit has had ZERO problems since I bought it a few years ago and I highly recommend this enclosure!

Cons: When I purchased the unit, I wished the cost was a little lower, but who wouldn't?

Other Thoughts: The high cost WAS a worry for me before I bought it, but after 3+ years of ownership, that should not worry someone wanting to purchase this unit. I have had a great experience with the Sans Digital 8-Bay Enclosure! Hey Sans Digital, I'd love to beta test any of your new equipment!

Pros: This is our 3rd Sans Digital external RAID enclosure. Their hardware is of good quality. The included Hardware RAID card is MUCH better than the other two previous units (Their 'RAID Controllers' actually HBA not true hardware RAID.

This unit has been on 24x7 for just over 7 months. It's filled with 2TB WD Enterprise series SATAII drives. It gets hammered by our SQL Servers all day & night. No failures and no glitches.

Our server room has lost power once since we installed this enclosure. The unit came right back up. We ran ChkDsk and off we went. No worries.

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: Maybe some way of Rack Mounting it? I don't like putting trays in our racks. It just looks unprofessional... but then again for the price, I'll deal with it. :)

Pros: Device really affordable although my struggling for a month with the Sans digital technical support and all the issues that i've faced made me return the device (excellent service from Newegg).

Cons: 1)power failure broke the raid set, i've tried 2 times, the tech support told me that it shouldn't loose the RAID set.
2)power failure crashed my server with inevitable restart 3)failure in creating the RAID 5 set
4)after 1 hour of creating a new RAID 5 set the device ask me to rebuild it!there was only a 5mb file and the process took 20hours!
5)verify procedure broke the raid 5 set
6)i was asked to update the bios but that procedure broke the raid. This from the web interface (using the application requires a windows machine)
7)the lights indicating the hard disk are not matching, if you put the 1 hd in the 1st place the web interface will tell you correctly the position 1/8 but the light on the device will tell you that it's the 5th hd! (changing the order of the cables you get the opposite)
8)i've changed the password from the web interface and the interface was not anymore accessible, could have been my fault!
9)and i didn't try to put a spare disk or to expand/migrate the r

Other Thoughts: The raid card is in embedded in your computer, this means that the device is like an internal hard drive. So two considerations: if you unplug a cable or the device has a power failure it will be ejected without a proper unmount procedure, second the RAID card driver is obviously integrated in the your operating system, this means it can fail and crash your desktop/server. On linux you will need to replace the module after a kernel compilation, on a mac or windows an update could force you to reinstall the driver (you will need to restart the machine). On a power failure of the device the MacOSX server will freeze and send a bunch of errors/warnings. The publicized increase of speed with an internal RAID card is not a big deal, you can get faster speed with iSCSI devices that embeds a RAID system.

Manufacturer Response:

Thank you for purchasing our product.

We reviewed your record on this issues. There are couple of points we would like to point out:

1, Power Failure could cause the PC system failure. However, it caused by power failure, not the unit.

2, The hard drives is Seagate desktop drives XT AS drives. It is a desktop rated drives and unpredictable problem could occur.

3, There are no LED as top drive is identify as LED 1, and bottom as LED 8. However, if you unit encounter this issues, we work with you to get it resolves.

4, Remove the drives while it is writing is could cause data damage, due to the data is first written to the internal cache first, and then write to the disk. This is called "Write Back" Cache policy. A power failure, in your case, part of the data is on the cache and not written to the disk, causing unexpected failure. You can recreate the RAID disk again using "un-initialize". To prevent this problem, you can use "Write Through", which will not written to the cache and directly to the disk. Please note the performance will decease.

5, RAID embedded on the computer, or on the actual enclosure have similar issues. Add a BBU (Battery Backup Unit) will help to prevent that. Please contact us for more detail.

6, iSCSI product will only go 100MB/s per channel. Therefore, unless you have 4 or more Gigabit port, or using 10G, the performance is limited.

For further questions, please contact our technical support at tech@sansdigital.com or 1-800-980-1988 and we will be able to resolve your issues.