Rosewill RSV-S4-X - 4-Bay 3.5” Hot-Swappable SATA - eSATA Storage System - RAID 0 / 1 / 10 / 5 / 5 + Spare, Spanning & JBOD Enclosure - RAID Controller Card Bundle

Pros: Very fast due to the fact that eSata is simply internal sata with a shielded cable and a "friendly" connector. Aesthetically pleasing, it has per-drive activity indicator lights and a well molded chassis that doesn't feel as flimsy as some of the others I have seen. Quiet operation, has a large blue led fan in the unit that isn't obtrusive at all. The included eSATA card has two ports on the back, which made adding a second unit a breeze without having to tear apart my server again.

I bought one unit earlier this year and absolutely loved it, so my wife bought me a second one for Christmas. We now have 15TB of online storage for media, her classwork projects and many virtualized servers for my home business without costing a small fortune!

Cons: It has a door on the front - why? It doesn't have rails, so you can't remove any of the drives without removing the chassis housing anyway, so the door seems redundant and unnecessarily adds to the cost and adds another point of failure. Rosewill's website currently only lists drivers for Windows 7, but drivers for other operating systems can be had from the Silicon Image website quite easily, but it may throw off newcomers so I still consider it a con. Lastly, they should offer a model without the PCIe card and lower the cost by $30 to compensate as I now have an extra PCIe eSATA card just collecting dust.

Overall Review: These units use port multiplier technology (multiple LUNs) and without a SATA controller that implements PM, it will never see anything but the first drive - as can be attested to by the user above me - which is why they attempt to avoid that by providing you with a PCIe card that is PM aware. Unfortunately this means you can't boot from a RAID array because the other drives won't join as an array member until the Windows driver is loaded for it. My first unit gave me fits with 4x1.5TB Barracuda drives, it kept dropping drive 3 and the RAID log said the device was removed. FIX: Go out to Silicon Image's website and download the latest drivers for the 3132 controller chip on the pci-e card for your operating system, PLUS download and upgrade the BIOS for the card - only when both were done did it stop dropping the drive, so the driver definitely depends on support code from the BIOS to work properly.

Pros: Works well, nice casing, easy to insert and remove disks through door on front.

Cons: Power supply burned out after a year of heavy use, had the same problem with two of these, very frustrating. Relatively easy to remove built-in power supply and replace - two 4-pin molex connectors inside.

Overall Review: None