Question 1

Is there hardware RAID onboard the device or is this software RAID?

Accepted Answer

When you say "software RAID", if you mean software running on your computer, I'm pretty sure the answer is no. It can sometimes be tough to tell exactly what is "inside the black box", and I did not dive deeply into this technical detail when purchasing the product, but I am pretty sure this really is a hardware RAID onboard the device. When installing this, you do have to install a device driver, but I believe that is just their custom USB driver. There is also a management app that you install. Unfortunately, I did not have a good experience with this product. Upon installation, I experienced random "hangs" of the device several times a week - one or more of the activity lights would lock on, and the device would stop responding, hanging any computer process that was trying to access the device. After 4 months and providing me 5 updated device drivers to troubleshoot/fix the issue, I finally gave up and requested to return the product for refund. There was significant confusion between myself, Highpoint and Newegg due to the fact that I was trying to return for refund outside of Newegg's normal return policy, in spite of the fact that I had engaged the manufacturer to attempt to correct the issue within 2 weeks of my purchase. Eventually, it got sorted out (currently waiting to actually receive my promised refund from Newegg), but I am still out $50 for return shipping of the defective product to the manufacturer. I was running this device on a Dell XPS 8930 running Windows 10 Home edition. I replaced this with a Mediasonic HRF7-SU3S2 PRORAID Box, another 4-bay USB connected external enclosure. It was less expensive, is also a hardware RAID onboard the device, and lacks the nice management interface of the Highpoint device, but this one has been running flawlessly for a month now.

Question 2

Can it be set up raid type 1 to drives 1 and 2 and a separate raid type 1 to drives 3 and 4 so that drive 2 is a copy of drive 1 and drive 4 is a copy of drive 3?

Accepted Answer

It can do that.

Question 3

Does performance drop with USB 3.0 connection on computre?

Accepted Answer

Of course.

Question 4

Can this box take larger than 10TB drives? I want to use four 14TB drives

Accepted Answer

The manufacturer's specifications for this enclosure only reference drive storage capacity in two places:

"Larger than 2 TB Drive and RAID Array support"
"Max. Capacity: Unlimited"

Just based on that, I would believe it would work fine.

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