CineRAID CR-H458 Hardware RAID 0, 1, 10, 3 and RAID 5, support 4 x 3.5" Hot Swappable Drive Bays USB 3.0 eSATA RAID SubSystem

Pros: Easy to setup.

Cons: 3 out of 4 didn't work!

Other Thoughts: First, let me say the one that works actually works really good. I'm very happy with it. The drives stay cool (compared to my Cavalry 2x Drive toaster which is HOT to the touch). It's quiet. durable, and I assume fast (once I get USB 3 running, 2.0 is not very fast...)

So, when it works it's great...

After researching hardware RAID setups I decided this was the way to go. I purchased one of these units from Newegg only to find that the power supply did not work. When I plug it into the wall I get the LED on the power supply adapter to light up but only briefly before it fades out. After 2 tries it no longer even light up to at all. I paid for shipping to send the entire unit back.

1 bad unit- ok, DOA are not that big of a deal depending on how many units they're shipping. Plus the reviews are GREAT so I considered purchasing again, but I was still a little nervous.

But then I came across this same unit directly from Tekram (the manufacturer I understand) at $60 less than Newegg. I purchased 2 units. When they arrived I was shocked to find only 1 of the 2 units actually had a working power supply adapter (AC adapter). I paid to ship the dead power adapter back to Tekram only to receive the replacement adapter today (Very fast shipping!) But... guess what... DEAD. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to have a DOA replacement...

So, I guess if you want 2 working units you need to purchase 8 units. If you're lucky you'll get at least 2 of the 8 that work.

(I only contacted contacted Tekram today to bring up this new concern so I will try to update this when it's all sorted out).

The unit that does work works great!

Pros: It's pretty. It's fairly compact.

Cons: The software CD is blank. Now I get to find the program and drivers and burn them to the CD they sent myself. Odd.

Pros: Has been a great enclosure up until today.

Cons: Unfortunately after 1.5yrs with 4 x 3tb drives installed and not a single hick-up, I awoke to a dead enclosure. Lucky for me I've been running it in JBOD and have lost NO data. All drive have mounted via SATA hot swap bay on my tower and all files are present with no corruption. Whew!

Other Thoughts: My point is, don't rely on this enclosure for mission critical data over a long period of time. Back-up, back-up, back-up. I guess in the end, you get what you pay for and it seems that I paid for 1.5yrs of reliability.

Pros: this is really small for 4 bay raid tower. i didnt even install any software just bundled with this card; HighPoint RocketU 1022A PCI-Express 2.0 x1 Low Profile USB 3.0 Controller Card. put in 4 disks i already had, all 1TB with movies stored on them and now windows recognizes all 4 disks. i have all kinds of storage now as i just run them as seprate drives.and i find i get pretty good transfer speeds up to 150mbs

Cons: none atm

Other Thoughts: very happy with this so far

Pros: Easy to install hard drives, quiet, solidly built.
Fast and reliable once I actually got things running.

Cons: Flakey operation with Windows 7 USB3, disks would disconnect and reconnect randomly for no apparent reason. I tried messing with power options to make sure hard drives and USB devices were not powered down or put to sleep but nothing worked.

I started with the USB3 connection because my Shuttle box has an eSATA port but does not support port multiplying. I purchased a Mediasonic ProBox HP1-SS3 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816322010) but when I connected the CineRaid to eSATA only three of the four hard drives were usable. The forth drive (1 TB) was seen by the Windows 7 disk management but there was nodrive letter assigned and every time I tried to assign one it said the drive could not be accessed and things needed to be refreshed but that did not help.

Other Thoughts: After spending many frustrating hours trying to get things to work reliably I went back to the Mediasonics eSATA card and tried the second port on the card, everything worked. I do not know what is different but it has been up and running for several days without a glitch.

I have two 500GB and two 1TB drives installed, all out of raid NAS boxes after upgrades. I store music, movies, data, and VirtualBox virtual machine images in the CineRaid and having the virtual machine crash or movie/music quit because of the many disconnects was unacceptable. I do not know if the problems were due to the CineRaid, Windows 7, or the USB3/eSATA hardware.

Pros: Was looking for a idiot proof raid box for my media for a LONG time. Don't know how I didn't find this. Setting up my 4 2TB HD Raid 5 array was easy peasy. Speeds are great both USB 3.0 and e-sata.

Cons: None, works great so far would buy again

Pros: Reasonably fast. Solid Construction. No tools required. Excellent customer service. Now that it has new firmware, the unit is a solid performer!

Cons: Ships needing firmware upgrade -- at least forLinux. Linux appears to be an after thought.

Other Thoughts: I installed an update of the firmware due to problems I had with the unit; please see my previous review. With the update and borrowing a Windows laptop I configured the unit is various formats including having two arrays of two disks (0 and 1,) no array, etc. All worked flawlessly with the new firmware. I now have the unit configured as a RAID 5 with the timeout set to its max hanging off my router and have had no problems.

Pros: This is a great external drive as long as you don't use the software it comes with. I hooked up two 2TB WD green drives in Raid0, the trick is to use the hardware switches on the back to configure the raid. Once i configured the raid switches and booted the drive, my windows7 and windows8 media center recognized it and i was able to format and use it. Speed is great for USB 3.0, using Sisoft Sandra disk benchmark i was able to hit 140Mb/s which is perfect for my media center. I think I paid just over $200 for the CineRaid and a 2TB disk. Great deal and i'm happy with the hardware.

Hardware wise, comes with both USB3.0 and ESATA cables. Fan is quite and the chassis is built out of metal so feels pretty solid.

Cons: The software sucks, good thing you don't have to use it. If you don't use the software, then you have to watch the LED on the front of the unit for a failure warning, not software notification.

Haven't owned it long enough to test a fail scenario, still not going to use it for mission-critical data. Just media.

Pros: Easy to Setup disks use a tool-less design on the rails
Quiet only makes a biy of noise on initial spin up
Fast, the data transfer speeds are impressive even on Raid 5
The box has blue lights on either side of the disks which gives it a classy look, when the lights get blinky because of disk activity

Cons: only bought one when it was on sale , Doesn't support Thunderbolt

Other Thoughts: This box is incredible. I have had no issues with it, it is fast, little to no noise. When i first got it is decided to do massive transfer tests with it (4TB +) it started out fast and the computer it was hooked up to got bogged down by other transfers going to a FW 800 raid box that was hooked up. I expected the transfer to continue at it's slower speed , but it slowly started moving up until it got to 104MB/sec (using the disk tools under win7, nothing real accurate).
this is one sexy box, i need to get a few more to replace my E-sata only enclosures

Pros: I got a great deal on the unit with a 2TB drive. It gives me the storage system on par with business uses on a home users budget.

Cons: I'm hoping that I just got a lemon where the controller failed and that a replacement unit that has been fully tested will prove to be more reliable.

Good unit, just keep an eye on it. Any flaky behavior could warrant watching.

Other Thoughts: This is a follow up to a previous review.

I was finally able to get a response from the CineRAID support email address. It would appear that their support services are handled through another company, TekRam. Once I got in touch someone from their RMA department (Kenny) things started moving along.

Apparently there is a known issue with the CR-458's controller [Hardware knowledge is not my strength, I'm a software guy but I know just enough to be dangerous]. The software found no controller (from my previous review) but I have been told that a replacement unit will do the trick.

Thanks, Mike, for you excellent analysis of the unit. The software told me that the data was in a degraded state so I'm holding out hope that a replacement unit and a new hard drive will rebuild and recover my data.