AMS VENUS T4U DS-2340UBK 3.5" USB 2.0 External Enclosure

Pros: Power button on the front of the unit. Since this is not used every single day I keep it powered down when not in use (less wear/heat on drives). Many external storage units have it on the back or even worse, not at all.

4 old IDE drives from 250G - 550G that are still being put to good use and not sitting on a shelf collecting dust. Have had this for over a year and have been very happy.

Cons: It's a minor issue but it's a very tight squeeze getting these drives inside the unit. If you have large hands as I do, expect some scratches on your hands and good amount of vulgarity during the installation process. LOL

Other Thoughts: Only improvements I could see would be a little more space inside the box for easier installation and a fan on the front/top for getter airflow. 4 IDEs in a small box can generate some heat after a while.

Pros: Excellent product...Had it for a couple of months now...Sofar no problem...The big plus on this product, you can turn off and on the fan and mix different size drives...

Cons: None sofar....

Pros: I have run this thing 24/7 for a 3 months and it works like a charm. I linked 4 old drives for 2.0 TB of space and it reads them quickly and silently.

Cons: Out of stock. I would like to have one more. IDE 750 gig drives are dirt cheap

Pros: Reasonably compact
JBOD option
Okay quality
Unique?

Cons: Pricey
Noisy / vibration
The power button doesn't work on mine

Other Thoughts: The T4U allows you to get four drives into one reasonably compact box. I haven't seen another USB box that does this.

Micro switches on the rear of the box allow you to configure the drives for either straight USB access, or used in JBOD - in other words, you can combine two or more drives, and leave one or two on their own. For my setup I left all of the drives seperate. They show up under Windows as four seperate drives. JBOD is too risky for my needs, but I imagine if you had several small drives, didn't need redundancy, and kept a good backup, then this may be a useful feature.

Unfortunately it is fairly expensive for what is basically a USB box - I wish AMS had left off the JBOD function and slashed the price.

Also, the power switch on mine doesn't work. Never has. Fortunately you can set it to shut down via USB, so it's not a problem. Also, the box tends to vibrate and buzz some - it may just be my drives.

Pros: Solid design
Great thumb-screws
Right length cables

Cons: Manual missing
Arrived defective
Could not get Combine mode working

Other Thoughts: Major pain figuring out if Cable Select was working or not, only to find out that the whole 2nd IDE controller was not responding. I wiggled everything for half and hour and got it working.

I hope people know that running this one in "Combine Mode" where it does a simple JBOD span fo all drives wil be very unreliable. I didn't work for me though and just said "Format failed" every time in XP. Mounting all four separately works fine though.

Pros: .

Cons: Died in 3 weeks. That says it all.

Pros: I have run this thing 24/7 for a year and it works like it's brand new. I linked 4 old drives for 1.5TB of space and it reads them quickly and silently. The fan should be turned around before you add hard drives to blow air on them, not suck hot air away. I'm thinking about getting another one and filling it with 4 1TB!

Cons: the LEDs are stupid bright. Almost had a plane land on my house. But use some black electrical tape and your ok. No real way to unplug them unless you snip.

Other Thoughts: buy one. Heck, buy two and save yourself the time.

Pros: Great for you old IDE drives! I had several I wanted to add to my EX470 Mediasmart homeserver. I filled this up with over a TB of older drives. Homerserver Picked them all up.

Cons: This gets real hot if you turn the Fan off. Its not loud so there is no reason to turn it off. It is actually almost silent. Led's are super bright. I put black electrical tape over them so I am not blinded in the dark.

Other Thoughts: None, this is a great little device anyone with older IDE drives should have. Raid is not necessary if you use a software raid. Besides mozy is only 5 bucs a month for unlimited backups.

Pros: Very easy to use. Nice and heavy duty. Was up and running in a few minutes with nary an issue.

Cons: Died. Time down the drain.

Other Thoughts: Read about these heating up. Backed up ~200GB on one drive. Waited 2 hours for it to cool. Started backing up another batch of files and left for tennis. I get home... Computer is frozen. Try CAD, power button (initiate shutdown). Nothing. Hit the switch. No (ext) hard drives show up. Wonderful. Power cycle the unit. Found 'Laytor' (Maxtor)... What the heck? Hard drive still doesn't show up once installed. Switch from cable select to dipswitchs on the HDs. Use only one at a time. Does the same thing, but lets me see the HD. Format works, I can see drive. I start copying a test file, freezes in same way. Filed for RMA. Not wasting my time with this tripe, even if I just got a bad unit. Everything was great apart from this royal PITA.

Pros: This is a follow up to the replacement AMS Venus that was RMA'ed to me because my first one was DOA. Newegg was quick and courteous while replacing my enclosure. As always, NEWEGG ROCKS!.

The replacement enclosure works great so far. It's as easy to set up and configure as most reviewers have stated.

Cons: The only con was that the 1st one was DOA. RAID would have been a nice feature for this but it's not designed to do RAID. I knew that when I bought it so I can't complain about that missing feature.