NORCO DS-24E 24 3.5" Drive Bays One SFF-8088 "IN" connector for connection to the host, two SFF-8088 "OUT" connectors for expansion to an additional JBOD enclosure External 4U 24 Bay 6G SAS/SATA Expander Rackmount RAID / JBOD Enclosure - OEM

Pros: Works with Solaris 11.1 out of the box.
Good results with Seagate ST4000DM000 4 TB 3.5" HD
Paired with 16-Port SAS 9201-16i 6Gb/s Per Port SATA+SAS PCIe 2.0
Ultra 40 M2 2222 with 2 back planes and 8 internal drive bays.

Cons: stock fans are L.O.U.D replace them with something quiet and your good to go.

Other Thoughts: Happy so far. If things change I will update this review.

Pros: It worked right out of the box with no special configuration required.
Nicely constructed, all internal wiring is neatly loomed, not zip-tied into bundles as you usually find. Cover can be removed by just removing two screws. System is capable of supporting your drives as one large volume. I don't know the upper limit, but I have a single volume of 88 TB.

Speedy! I transferred files from my internal RAID drive with sustained rates of 150 to 200 MB/sec. I did a concurrent transfer from two network cards and two NAS servers for a combined total of 350 to 400 MB/sec. Never the less, it's taking days to transfer 60 TB of video files from the NAS boxes to the new server.

Cons: Poor quality control. The unit arrived with the power connector for the top back-plane disconnected. I soon found out why - it didn't work! There are several spare connectors, so I swapped them around until I got a working combination. This is a good example of how truly fragile RAID is, you can loose the whole array because of one bad connection!

It's hard to believe that the manufacturer let this get out the door in a non-working condition. Never the less, I would still buy another one if I need to expand the system. The box supports daisy-chaining up to two additional boxes.

Other Thoughts: If you are trying to build a video server with one large volume, beware, every component of the system must be able to support a single volume over 16TB. I am presenting one possible solution here.

My "server" is running Windows 7 64-bit (don't use 32-bit). I installed an Areca ARC-1882iX-24-4G-NC in the server and connected the box to the server with a Belkin Model F3X1983-04M 13 ft. Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) external cable. I populated the drive bays with (24) Hitachi HUS724040ALE640 in RAID 6. I chose enterprise drives and bought a few spares now, because when I need the spares this drive will probably be out of production.

Pros: Great unit for the price. Does what it is supposed to do. Good support from the vendor, I had a failing PS unit and the vendor was very responsive (even over a weekend) with an new PS sent, no paper work required! I replaced the original fans for some quieter fans. I lost a little airflow but with 24 WD RE4 2 TB running 24 hours a day, highest temp seen is 104F. Given my office hit 75, and reduced the airflow, hard to beat. Additional note: The drive trays work well with 2.5” drives, I tested with some SSDs in and they worked great with SSDs with bottom mounted screws in the tray.

Cons: Fans are LOUD! but work great.

Other Thoughts: I’m about to get a second unit so I guess you can say I like it.

Pros: Hey guys i been eyeing this up for awhile now.. What would all be needed to get this to work in a home environment?

This does have server capability correct? so basically i would just need to buy this and i would be up and running? or would i need a server as well? if so, what server would you recommend?

Cons: i have about 2000 to spent total.

Pros: Its not exactly cheap but it is about the least expensive RAID enclosure of this size that I have seen. I thought about going with the bare drive version and trying to set up my own SAS Expander but it seemed like the price kept adding up to about what this would be. Its nice having the integrated SAS expander. I was pleasantly surprised that the 3 fans + power supply were quiet. I was worried it would have a airplane fan on it suitable for server rooms and would drive me crazy at my house but it is nice and quiet and seems to provide sufficient cooling for the drives.

Cons: None I have found so far.

Other Thoughts: The Drive extender in Windows Home Server 2008 was a nice way to easily add a drive at a time but with 10 drives and a few errors / corrupt volumes scanning with CHKDSK was a painful process. WHS 2011 ditched the Drive Extender feature along with shared file duplication and encourages a RAID configuration for data protection. It is a more expensive startup cost but probably much more reliable and gives better performance for streaming video.

Pros: We needed more disks for our backup server, looked at big namebrand solutions and they were silly expensive, tried this Norco and works awesome. Installed (24) Hitachi 3TB drives, turned it on, connected it to an Areca 1880X RAID adapter in our backup server with an SFF-8088 cable and formatted two RAID6 arrays. Can you say S-T-O-R-A-G-E.

I opened the case and looked inside at the expander they used and its by Areca, went online and noticed it employs the LSISAS2x36 expander chip, which I also read is the best SAS-2 expander chip on the market, so the guts of this thing appear to be best of breed.

Cons: None so far. I guess if I was going to use this for home it might seem pricey and you might be able to jimmy rig something cheaper with random parts, but we didn't have time for that - we literally just needed a box to add more drives and then forget about.

Other Thoughts: At first we were concerned whether the three rear fans would be enough cooling for 24 drives, but after running this for over a week in a room at 75 degrees ambient, its more than adequate.