Rosewill RSV-S8 SATA 3G 2.5" & 3.5" HDD 8-Bay RAID 0/1/5/10/5+spare/Spanning/JBOD Storage Enclosure System with 120mm cooling fan/ Port Multiplier/ PCIe card included/ Tray design

Pros: got it for $150 off of craigslist, it hold eight drives.

Cons: Bright blue LED, only SATA-II, no USB or ethernet.
See "Other thoughts" below on how to fix the blue LED issue.

Other Thoughts: I unscrewed the panel, unscrewed the fan, and snipped off the LEDs. Still works perfectly fine and now I can sleep at night. Its not loud, any the lights in the front aren't absurdly bright like the blue rear fan light was. Much better now :).

The only reason I wrote this was because I searched to see if the blue lights could be simply snipped to turn them off and saw references to people mentioning that they would, but no confirmations that this was difficult or messed up the fan. I just did it and the fan is working fine and the device is unharmed without its power-of-a-thousand-suns blue LEDs in the back.

Tools needed:
Knife or scissors to snip led wires,
Flatedge to pry them out of the edge of the fan (doesn't take much force at all)
Phillpps head screwdriver to remove the fan and side panel.

Total time ~10min if you work slowly. I didn't even bother unplugging the fan from the board since it had plenty of slack in the wires :).

Pros: I wrote a one star review earlier but that is the only way you can submit or it would have been zero stars. The idiot who designed this should be fired, then flogged, and blacklisted from engineering for life. To put the LEDs in two rows at the bottom in reverse order ascending is utter stupidty. When you do have a drive failure you can't figure out which drive it is until you start ejecting drives and play ring around the rosie...

Cons: Too many to note..

Pros: As a network and systems engineer, I work with enterprise raid daily. Also have multiple raids at home, mostly cheap Startech's and they have been working flawlessly for 3-5 years. The New Rosewill was easy to setup, installed identical WD 500 gig 7200's just like in my StarTechs. Also tried Seagate 500 gig 7200s (both have 16 meg cache which should sufficient for a storage medium for my music collection. It is not. I haven't been able to copy anything to either of the two raids (which by the way limit you to 4 drives per channel. You can't choose a single channel with say, 5 drives and 3 global spares for a true solution. The new drives take turns going orphan. I even tried hooking into an existing working solution, and just setting up 4 drives as a parity raid with a similar but different ESata external card. Same results. Actually random results are more like it. Like I stated earlier, the drives randomly orphan; you can delete the software raid from the card, recreate it, and 5 minutes later after formatting, and starting to copy a completely different drive will orphan..

Cons: More expensive than the 5 disk StorBox which I've come to admire for a home Sata Raid, rebuilds on the fly with a trye drive failure. The new Rosewill can't touch it...

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,
Thank you very much for purchasing this unit.
We strive to provide the most reliable and highest quality products to our customers.

Please kindly contact the Rosewill support team
Phone: 1- 800-575-9885
Email: rma@rosewill.com

So we may assist you with (in-warranty) replacement.
We look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,
Rosewill Customer Care

Pros: I picked this up to get more storage space in on an already full server. The case is reasonably made and there is plenty of airflow through it to keep the drives cool. Also, there are individual activity lights for each drive. The LEDS aren't too bright either which is nice.

Once I had swapped out the e-sata card it ran wonderfully.

Cons: However, the e-sata card that it comes with is an utter pile of garbage. Nothing but greif out of it on linux. It's some terrible base model Silicon Image chip, that barely seems to support port multiplier properly. Oddly enough the fix is incredibly simple: Get a RC-226 with a Marvel chip on it.

Other Thoughts: I only have four 4TB drives in the enclosure at the moment, but it's working great so far. Once it's full I will probably convert it over to a raid 6 or similar.

Pros: Supports 8 drives, includes literally everything you need to get it up and running. I didn't have to source anything, even cables. Solid construction, for the most part. The drive trays feel a little flimsy, but I haven't had a problem with them and the case is very sturdy. It's also one of the best packed products I've ever gotten from newegg. Low power usage, ~50w with (5) 7200rpm drives idling.

Cons: The design of the case seems to preclude direct airflow over the HDDs. The side venting along with the single rear fan makes directing airflow directly over the drives seem unlikely. That being said, they aren't really getting hot either.

Other Thoughts: Some other reviewers have complained about the lack of 8 drive RAID5 support. First, I'd like to point out that RAID5 with an even number of disks is a bad idea. The way the data is striped across the drives, it read/writes unevenly with an even number of disks and you get exceptionally poor performance out of the raid. People bemoan the lack of "hardware" raid on these cards, when they really have no idea what they are talking about. Modern CPUs are many -- MANY more times powerful than the XOR CPUs included on "true hardware" raid cards, that also cost more than the case itself. The parity calculations from any type of raid barely burden the CPU with 1-2% usage. Sometimes you will see 5% in cases where the array is maxed out.

Anyway, the included SIL3132 1x PCIEx esata card only supports 5 drives in Raid 5 mode. That's not an issue for me, as I run it in JBOD mode and use a software raid 4 solution. I broke a 5 disk raid 5 setup specifically in favor of this. I lose speed I couldn't use on a NAS (500MB/s reads, 350MB/s Writes), in favor of not losing all of my data if rebuilding the array fails, and being able to expand the array whenever I want. I had to rebuild the raid 5 array twice due to actual failed drives (not drop outs), and to think a ridiculous unrecoverable read error would take out all 17TB of data was silly. Raid 4 is a fair bit slower in terms of raw speed, but worst case I will never lose more data than what was on the failed drive, and for me that was more important. Even more important, I am no longer locked into purchasing the exact same model of drive to keep the array expanding. Raid 5 with heterogeneous disks have high failure rates. The card serves it's purpose it was intended for very well. People that complain it doesn't do something it's specifically advertised as not capable of should get slapped by Rick James, *****.

Pros: Fast, Reliable, Easy to setup, HOT SWAP! Linux compatible! This unit has been 100% reliable since day one. I installed it in July 2012 and it has been running 24/7 with 8 x 1T drives in a RAID 6 configuration. I had one hard drive go bad (old used drive) which was easily swapped out without any disruption to data access.

Cons: I have not had any negative issues so far.

Other Thoughts: Although the specs say "RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 5+spare", I have this unit set up as RAID 6 to give me 2 check sum drives. This uses more drive space but gives me double disk failure reliability without the risk of lost data. This gives me 6 data drives and 2 check sum drives (6T of data storage 2T of redundancy) Configure it as you like. I am using Linux mdadmin for my RAID interface.

Pros: Easy to setup, dual port, includes raid card, decent power supply.

Cons: Not a fan of software raid cards (the included card is) and was a bit worried about the reviews of it. I did not use the included card with the case as I needed more than 2 eSATA ports. Also, would have been 5 stars but the construction of the drive trays, plastic handles, felt cheap, sturdy but cheap.

Other Thoughts: I'm using this with a Highpoint Rocket RAID 644L right now and had no problems with the port multiplier, setup, or initialization of the array in a Dell Poweredge 2950.

One thing, if you're using RAID, do not use any type of "green" drives. These have very liberal settings for timeouts and responses with RAID configurations which can lead to dropped drives and broken arrays.

I'm using 4 western digital 2tb Red drives as they are designed for NAS, Hopefully they won't have that issue. If you want a guarantee buy a WD black, or any other manufacturers enterprise level drivers. I repeat avoid "green" drives in a RAID array.

Pros: I have had this (Or older version of) for about 4 years. I knew right from the beginning that the card was horrible so I purchased another; eventually a MB with eSATA. I only use this for JBOD with a Windows Home Server 2003 and then Windows Home Server 2011 using Drive Bender.
I have never had any problems with this device, it has always been very reliable. Never had I needed to re-boot it or the server that it was attached to.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: If you need lots of storage this is a great way to go. Do yourself a favor though and pick up another eSata card that supports raid. These cards are really not that expensive and once you do, you will be happy.

Also note that Home server works well with this device!

Pros: High capacity for a non-rackmount enclosure. Minimal hardware quirks (at least when using as a JBOD passthrough -- I haven't bothered trying to use hardware RAID on this).

Cons: The power button can get a little stuck, with any luck you won't be powering it on and off very much. Case fan and power supply fan are louder than ideal for home hardware; unfortunately even the quietest replacement fan I could find was louder than I wanted. So keep it somewhere where you won't mind some white noise.

Other Thoughts: NOTE FOR LINUX USERS:

This hardware is advertised as using a Silicon Image 3726 port multiplier, which is natively supported in the Linux kernel (with some specific behavioral quirks applied). HOWEVER, the unit I got used a 3826 instead. This chipset seems to work identically to the 3726, but because the revision number is different, the quirk-detection code misses it.

Until a patch for this gets integrated into the kernel sources, if you get a unit with the 3826 instead of the 3726, you'll need to compile a custom kernel. Look in drivers/ata/libata-pmp.c for references to 0x3726 and modify the if() conditions - there should be two of them - to look for 0x3826 as well.

Pros: - Power switch on the front.
- trays slide out easily.

Cons: I have had the enclosure for about 2 years. About 8 months in when moving the enclosure to a new room the little tab inside one of the rear SATA ports broke off limiting me to 4 drives. I can't imagine that I was rough with it, so it probably poor construction. I should have RMA'd it but was lazy.

A few months after that the fan started making a lot of noise. Every other day or so it makes a huge racket. It is quite loud and scary sounding, like a death rattle.

Other Thoughts: I imagine most people looking for something with this much capacity will be using it on a machine that stays on most of the time. I would imagine they should have place high quality components with long MTTF, but it does not look like the case.

The fan should be an easy fix at about $5.

I don't know if I will be able to replace the broken SATA port on the rear.

When you get down to it, there are not a lot of 8 port enclosures in this price range. Since I don't want to build another computer, I'd still purchase it, but be prepared to perform a repair yourself since the warranty only covers 1 year.