Mediasonic H82-SU3S2 3.5" Black USB3.0 & eSATA ProBox 8 Bay External Hard Drive Enclosure

Pros: Excellent performance, quiet active cooling, efficient power use, makes it possible to put all those drives sitting around to use whenever you want. I have never had the drives drop off using a 2012 Mac Mini and USB 3.0.

Reading reviews there seems to be a lot of confusion about that this housing does with drives. It is NOT RAID and does not combine (span) the drives, but depending on your system you can do those with the OS. Spanning selected drives with the Mac OS works great.

Cons: I really only have one "con", which could also be a "pro" depending on your purpose. The enclosure puts the drives to sleep rather quickly when they are idle. This is great for a lot of cases where you have several drives installed which are only occasionally accessed, but my primary intent was to use this as a media server.

FWIW, I am using a 2012 Mac Mini Quad Core with iTunes defaulting to save to multiple drives which are OS configured to span as one volume. The issue is that when the drives go to sleep it causes problems using them to store media. First, you always have to wait for the drives (and sometimes successive drives) to spin up before the piece of media you want becomes available. Second and more importantly, iTunes seems to often believe the drives simply aren't available and starts refusing to save new content until the computer is restarted. I also suspect all the spinning up and down isn't good for the drives in the long run and with this particular use it would be better if they ran all the time.

Other Thoughts: Prior to getting this enclosure, I was using a 4 bay Vantec HX4 enclosure to house the media drives. With it the drives never spin down unless the computer is shut off, which works much better for the use I described above. I still have a lot of drives, some used to backup my critical content, including a full backup of the spanned media drives. So, what seems to have been my best solution is to use the Vantec enclosure for the media drives and this one for backup drives (I just un-mount them so they will spin down and not clutter the desktop when I don't need them) as well as some other drives which only get sporadic use, so they will automatically spin down when they aren't needed, which is most of the time.

It's probably also important to say I am using Samsung green drives for media. Some non-green drives may not spin down, but I also have several other non-green drives in this housing and they all spin down.

Pros: Internal Power Supply
Automatic fan speed control
USB 3.0 support
Turns off automatically when PC is powered off
JBOD(No Builtin Raid) - More choices and less compatibility issues

Cons: No mechanism to have it power on when the PC is powered on although I think it does have an optional sleep mode.

Other Thoughts: This is the second device I've purchased after buying one about a year ago. I'm using the new unit with a 8 drive RAID 5 array connected via USB 3.0 to a PC running the lastest ubuntu LTS server. I've had the newest unit constantly copying and resyncing the RAID array for several days now without any drive failures.

I think this device is very,very sensitive to the exact USB 3.0 chipset, drivers, and hard drive models used especially if RAID is used. USB 2.0 appears to work with just about anything. Keep in mind that many hard drive brands intentionally do not work well in RAID arrays by design since they want you to buy the "enterprise" versions.

Pros: 8 Drives support
Built in (supposedly hardware) Raid
Pretty simple configuration

Cons: Performance is mediocre. I have an Asus P8Z68-V Pro/Gen3, I am using the onboard USB 3 on the back panel. 4x3TB seagate 7200rpm drive. Reading from a 8x2TB raid 5 setup. I get a consistant of 7 - 8MB write using USB3, file size ranging from 10Kb to 10Gb. Read is a bit faster at 50 - 60Mb. In comparison to my regular Seagate USB3 3TB drive, I get consistant of 40 - 50Mb write and 80 - 90Mb read.

I have purchase a USB PCIe card and waiting for that to come in. Hopefully that can boost the performance to at least 50 - 60Mb write. But at the moment, this is by far the most disappointing san/raid device I have used.

Other Thoughts: It would be nice if this raid system has some sort of diagnostic tools to show what is going on with the system. My other raid took 2 days to initialize 8x2TB raid 5, while this one is almost instant, so I am wondering if the poor performance is due to initial setup. But I have no indicator on the box nor do i have any type of software tools to figure that out. This device is a great idea, but poorly implemented and poorly supported. Company website has less information than newegg which is pretty sad.

Pros: Its a really good idea

Cons: USB port wouldn't even work 3.0 or 2.0 switched it to esata only 3 of the 7 drives lit up, and I could not even get the drives to show up in windows

Other Thoughts: Sent for replacement $26 out of my pocket and if the next wont work Im out $52 then I will not be a happy camper Its not neweggs fault I will give mediasonic anthor shot I guess

Pros: Like everybody else said, it's quiet and efficient.

Cons: Every time when I copy many files (more than 100G), the connection gets lost after a while. I have tried everything I can, but it just keep happening.

Other Thoughts: They have a forum, and I've communicate with them many time. I would say the customer service is fine. it's just the product needs to be improved.

Pros: -Reasonable price for USB 3.0 external storage.

-Appreciate the auto shut down feature (turns off HD when idle and when computer shuts down).

-Can achieve some excellent data transfer rates.

-Very, very quiet!

Cons: -As some others have said, the bays that the hard drives fit into are slightly concerning, but they appear to hold the drive just fine

-DISCLAIMER: I've only tested the USB 3.0 connector, not USB 2.0 or eSata. I prefer to stay away from eSata due to some of the nightmares I've had with raids + eSata (hence the reason for the USB 3.0 connection), but it seems like problems still exist.

-If you plan on doing a lot of data transferring (hard drive to hard drive transfers), data compression, or simply doing any activity that requires extended amounts of read/writes, all hard drives within the enclosure WILL DROP OUT.

- To me, it seems like there is a bottleneck somewhere that causes all the hard drives to just drop out and MOST OF THE TIME, reconnect. If they don't reconnect, you do have to power cycle the enclosure (re-sync doesn't seem to do anything).

- Over the course of a month, I have have had this enclosure drop out on me probably 20+ times but keep in mind this has happened when transferring files from one hard drive to another, (transferring 1gb+ of data caused the enclosure to drop out 4 times!

Other Thoughts: When purchasing a product, I always read the reviews. Hopefully this will help others.

I think the 3 egg rating is appropriate despite the amount of issues I've had because:

-I have not tested any other medium (USB 2.0 or eSata)
-I cannot verify that this is a main board issue.

If the above were true, I would likely have given this 2 eggs.

I do have the latest 3.0 drivers for my main board and have never had a issue with any other 3.0 device connected.

Would not suggest high data reading/writing to this unit especially if writing/reading to/from multiple hard drives within this enclosure at one time.

Despite the issues, this isn't a horrible product and I do think its simply a USB 3.0 issue. Now that everything is setup and saved, the drop outs are minimal.

I have been able to watch several HD quality movies from hard drives within the enclosure with no issue.

Would I buy this product again? No
Would I recommend it to anyone else? Probably not

Pros: Well-constructed. Holds EIGHT drives! Very easy to set up with USB 3.0 (which makes data transfers extremely fast!). This case makes accessing my current library of six external drives super easy. No more swapping them out to a dual drive open-case.

Cons: NONE!

Other Thoughts: In all honesty, I just got this case in today and I was so excited about it that I really wanted to get this review done. I've wanted something like this for a long time and final took the plunge. My computer, which is two years old, doesn't have any USB 3.0 connections, so I purchased a SYBA USB 3.0 (3+1) PCI-e Controller Card, Etron Chipset, Molex (IDE HD 4-pin) Built-iModel SY-PEX20135 (Item #N82E16815124117) to take care of that issue. As of now, I highly recommend this unit. When I eventually load it up with four more drives, I'll report back with an update if there are any negative issues. I don't expect any though.

Pros: This enclosure is JBOD, not JOBD... First time I've seen "JOBD" used... had to look it up.

JBOD = Just A Bunch of Disks (8 drives, 8 volumes in OS)
JOBD = Just One Big Disk (8 drives, 1 volume in OS)

Worst acronyms ever.

Anyway, when you format the drives in windows (7 and 8...maybe vista) and create the volumes, you can create a dynamic "spanned" volume which will make it appear exactly as "Just One Big Disk".

Problem solved. JOBD or JBOD all in the same enclosure if you know what you're doing.

Cons: None that I can think of.

Pros: Does what the title states. It is an external drive enclosure. Gives access to the drives in the enclosure.

Cons: I read in the reviews that it works just fine as a JOBD. So I bought it assuming it can do that (be one really big disk), it cannot. If you have 8 drives you will 8 drives in the OS. It does not aggregate the drives into one, for that you need the next version up with a RAID controller. Did have to reseat the drives as the first time it did not recognize the drives.

Other Thoughts: I should have read the manual which does not indicate it can do JOBD.

Pros: Compact size for holding 8 3.5" drives, USB3 or (single) eSATA connector, pretty solid construction. I don't mind the plastic door at all, how often do I really need to open it? Once, to install drives. Variable Fans (or auto), custom power off settings (15sec, sleep, or never off).

Cons: I had to actually read the included instructions to figure out how to disable the auto-power off, but after that, nothing really.

Other Thoughts: I installed 8 1.5TB seagate drives first with USB3 using ubuntu 12.04 + ubuntu-zfs. Had a bit of a problem with drives going to sleep after inactivity but I blame seagate, for not supporting APM flags on the drives, not the enclosure. I switched to eSATA just to see and I can't tell any difference for normal home media serving use. If you use eSATA your eSATA controller must support port multiplying.