Mediasonic HF2-SU2S2 3.5" Black USB2.0 & eSATA Pro Box 4 Bay Enclosure

Pros: The build quality on this enclosure is good, all of the drives fit securely. Keeps green power drives quite cool, works over USB 2.0 and eSata.

Cons: The power cable for this enclosure is on the side which makes it difficult to place if your workspace is at all crowded. It does not always recognize drives properly over USB 2.0 and requires a port multiplier to recognize multiple drives over eSata.

Other Thoughts: I had 4 WD 1TB Green drives running in this for over a year and it worked great as a RAID 10 setup using my port multiplier RAID controller. The raid controller card (in my system not the enclosure) failed and I had a difficult time getting the drives to show up on USB 2.0. Luckily I had just backed up the data on the array to a 2TB single drive.

Pros: 4 bay with support for 2tb drives
esata 3gbps
solid build quality
excellent price
Easy to swap out drives

Cons: usb 2.0
could have better ventilation
far too many BRIGHT blinking leds, you can either live with it, tape over it, or disassemble and unsolder/break of the smd leds, but its not a big deal.

Other Thoughts: Have owned this enclosure for over a year now, and am very happy with it. A few cons, but overall never had any problems, and its worked perfectly with any drive i've thrown at it, including 2.5" satas for temporary transfers without having to open my tower case.

Make sure your esata controller is port multiplier compatible, usb 2.0 is too slow for sata drives imho.

5400rpm drives work well in the enclosure and stay cool, but you may want to beef up the fan or mod the enclosure if you want 7200's. 10k's prob would bottleneck at the 3.0gbp speeds, and overheat if you tried any kind of raid setup. Old velociraptors (sata II) you can get away with, assuming you only put one or two in the case and add another fan up front.


Overall, its a great enclosure. For the price its a good deal, especially considering its build quality. Backup/jbod storage is where this excells, but for speed freaks who want to raid up 7200 or 10k drives, you may want to look elsewhere. Not a con though, its not designed for that application. SATA II is more than enough for fast raid speeds with a few 5200 rpm drives in raid 0 or 1. Anything above that will hit a bottleneck and you need a sata III enclosure/controller.

Pros: I've been using two of these units since 2011.

One is hooked up to my Mac Pro 2009 (3,1) and serves as a backup drive bay for my video editing and animation projects. It connects to my Rosewill RC-219 eSata PCI card and achieves read speeds of around 90-100 MB/sec. I have cycled many 2TB drives (mainly Seagate and Samsung) in and out of this drive bay. I've never had any read/write errors or disk malfunctions. Super reliable!

I also have one of these units hooked up to a Patriot Memory PBO Core media player. Again, I typically house 4 2TB drives in this unit. I mainly play uncompressed .mkv blu ray rips. Great performance, no hiccups at USB 2.0 speeds. The auto on/off function works really well with the PBO.

Cons: None.

Pros: *Can Run 4 Hardrives off a single cable to the PC
*USB 2.0 and eSATA
*80MM Exaust Fan (Auto or 3 speed settings) to prevent overheating
*Syncronization / Sleep with the PC (Optional)

Cons: *The Included Power Cable, USB Cable, and eSATA cable was too short so I recommend getting longer ones when buying this.
*The front cover sometimes Got stuck when I push it to open/close it and The metal plate that snaps the drives in place is tricky to adjust to get it to fit back on.

Other Thoughts: I use to run each of my external drives in a invidual external bays which used up too many USB ports, and Power Plugs so its nice to have all my drives off 1 cable / power plug now.

Overall this is the one of the best external storage solutions I seen so far, I have a 2TB, 1TB, and 2 x 80GB drives currently running it, and its expandable to 16 TB (4 x 4TB drives) so this should last me a while.

I'm running this on USB since copy performance doesn't matter to me, but if you plan on using ESATA be sure your motherboard supports Hot Swap / Port Multiplyer

Pros: Great Enclosure for a quick backup

Cons: Win 8 Pro doesnt recognize the enclosure so i can only use it if I network it to a win 7 machine and link it to my win 8 pro machine. would have given it 5 eggs if it was compatible with win 8.

Pros: Awesome solution for small form factor PC builds (Such as a media center). Disks are easily installed and removed and working with the device seemed more like a charm rather than a chore. Once the drives were installed, I setup permissions and away went the files through the network.

I've had it 2+ years now and all drives and the enclosure are still going strong without problems. That also includes lots of random power outages as well.

Cons: I was a little bit nervous about the mediasonic name as I haven't had any of their products previously. That is now very far behind me. Needs a computer as this isn't a NAS solution, but I knew that when I bought it.

Other Thoughts: I was going to go with a higher priced NAS box BUT I'm so happy I didn't. Looking back at all of the NAS solutions and negative reviews here in the egg makes me happy I went with this instead. I'm going to be a media sonic purchaser for many years to come. Extremely pleased.

Pros: Supports esata, easy installation, compact. Works great for a while.

Cons: Disks sometimes do not appear on boot on both usb and esata. Disk access LEDs come on constantly after spin-up and don't stop. Power cycle usually fixes it for the first few months after this problem appears. Then power cycles do not fix it. Then esata does not work at all. USB 2.0 works, but slowly. 40MB/s transfer speed on usb 2.0, external disk to internal sata disk.

Other Thoughts: It worked great for a year, then worked ok after 1 year for 3 or 4 months, then it works but not well after 18 months. Then esata dies completely after 26 months. Causes some minor disk corruption from constant power cycling of disks and controller failure. I would buy it again, but plan on replacing it after some time.

Pros: Works as described, helped me clean up my office by opening and throwing away 4 external HDD cases

Cons: esata isn't a great adapter for me and usb 3.0, but there's a reason it's less expensive than some other enclosures. It's not a fault of Mediasonic.

Pros: High build quality, nice looking indeed
Very quiet
Nice LEDs, maybe too bright for some environs
Love that it turns off when my PC hibernates

Cons: LEDs will be too bright for e.g. Home Theater use
Four drives, four drive letters; this is not a RAID box (but neither is it advertised as such; know what you're buying)
Inadequate documentation (press/hold INTERFACE!)

Other Thoughts: Finally got a good deal on drives (here of course) and fired-up this box which I'd bought on sale at Newegg months ago. Folks here said to have USB connected to then switch to eSATA, but nobody said YOU HAVE TO PRESS-AND-HOLD THE INTERFACE BUTTON UNTIL THE ESATA MODE ENGAGES and its LED lights. I found this on the Mediasonic web forum. Worked.

Then I found that although my mobo has Port Multiplier capability, its JMicron chip will only RAID the two eSATA ports--i.e. the Probox gets plugged to one of two eSATA ports, and just 1of4 drives is seen by the JMicron RAID BIOS, which is looking to make RAID with the other eSATA port. So no RAID for me.

Next I used Windows Disk Mgmt to create a single spanned volume where my four 1TB drives became a single drive letter of 4TB. This LOOKS good but then I read that spanned volumes are very fragile i.e. that 1 big volume is lost when any of the 4 drives goes bad.

OK so now I have M: N: O: P:--I'm happy--Mediasonic done good! Newegg rulez!

Pros: So far works well USB 2.0 Only.
Looks solid but it is far from it.

Cons: eSata does not work for multi drives even with port multiplier enabled machines.
USB 3.0 ports do not recognize the hard drives, Windows will ask you to format known good drives and it will still not recognize the drives, and yes I used the enclosed USB3.0 Cable.
The unit shut down for no apparent reason once but I have been unable to recreate the problem.
Build Quality leaves alot to be desired, the handles are cheap and probably unnecessary, although it does space the front retainer plate almost correctly. The front retainer plate holds the cover and you need to make sure that it sits exactly right otherwise the cover may not stay up correctly.
Power plug is on the side of the unit it appears there is a spot in the back next to the power switch that was probably the original intended location.

Other Thoughts: Looks to me like a flaky unit I do not normally write reviews