Pros: Drives are easy to install and the unit is nicely designed for use in public view. It doesn't make a lot of noise when on, though it's louder than would be ideal for most media centers (in my media center, these boxes are in a soundproofed cabinet with large quiet fans in the rear).

Cons: The included controller card is awful. I use a Samsung 32GB SLC SSD for boot, and when the included interface card was working, its on board BIOS (for software RAID) increased my boot time by 30 seconds! Note I said "when it worked." The card was very intermittent in my J&W Minix MB (780G/SB700/9350e). The SATARAID5 management software that comes with this unit, by the way is terrible and looks like it was written by a kid over the summer.

Overall Review: Here's the wierd thing. I e-mailed Sans Digital some time back to ask if the box would would work with the SB700 instead of their controller card and they said "No, the SB700 doesn't understand Port Multipliers." On a lark, I plugged the unit into my SB700 eSATA port and it worked! It later stopped working and I discovered it was because I had uninstalled the AMD/ATI AHCI Compatible RAID Controller driver. I reinstalled the AMD RAID driver, and suddenly all 5 drives show up in Vista RELIABLY and without fail. Note this mode of operation does NOT require setting "RAID" in the BIOS, so the AMD RAID PROMs are not in the boot sequence and my boot times are nice and fast again. With all 5 drives showing up in Vista, I am using Vista's own striping capability to get the speed I desire (actually striping across TWO units so I have two eSATA ports worth of transfer bandwidth).

Pros: This cabinet allows attachment of 5 drives to any computer via either USB 2.0/3.0 or eSATA without requiring software or drivers on the attached machine. I loaded mine with 5 x Samsung Spinpoint F4EG 2 TB SATA2 5400rpm 32 MB Hard Drive HD204UI/Z4 to create a 10 TB tower I can use to image my existing 10 TB RAID tower constructed using enterprise-class (high reliability) drives. When configured as RAID 0 with the Samsung drives, I see over 200 MBPS throughput on both the eSATA and USB 3.0 interfaces. I find the unit attractive, and it's build quality is pretty high in my opinion.

Cons: I had some difficulty getting the tower set-up properly. I assumed I only needed to set the switches on the back then power up while pressing the reset button to configure the unit. No matter what position I put those switches in, however, the tower reported as 5 independent drives to Windows 7 Pro. I finally figured out that I had to run the "Raid Monitoring Utility" on the install disk to format and configure the tower. Once configured, the tower reports as expected on all machines without having to load any software or drivers. I am an engineer by profession, and I have built a lot of custom computer rigs over the years. Perhaps I was too smart for my own britches, and should have just blindly walked through the install. I find it odd that I had to run the "monitor utility" to do the initial configuration, and I remain baffled regarding the purpose of the switches given the need to configure in software !

Overall Review: I love the capability this tower provides. It's like having a 200 MBPS "thumb drive" that can be connected via USB 2.0/3.0 or eSATA to any machine. I decided to ignore my set-up problems when assigning a 5 star rating because I see few others seem to be complaining; I must have just been stupid ! Note the drive does not report on my SB700 south bridge unless the AMD RAID drivers are installed. For whatever reason, the support for port multipliers was put into the AMD RAID drivers rather than the core driver. I already knew this from experience with my other RAID towers, but thought I'd pass it along in case others want to direct-connect to an SB700. Note the SATA connection works flawlessly on my Core i7 laptop that uses an Intel HM55 chipset. The drive immediate installs and starts working without having to install any drivers as I did with my AMD SB700 southbridge system.

Pros: I am using 5 of these drives in a SansDigita TR5UT RAID tower purely to backup 10 x 1 TB enterprise-class drives (high reliability) in two existing RAID towers (5 drives each). These new 2 TB drives are for periodic backup only, and thus do not need to be as fast or reliable as the main set. I installed all 5 into the new RAID tower and, after working through the poor documentation that came with the tower, have a 10 TB "drive" that connects right up to any computer via USB 2.0/3.0 or eSATA with no drivers or software required. The drives are very quiet, and I'm seeing ~ 200 MBPS transfer speeds using either eSATA or USB 3.0

Cons: I needed 5 drives to populate the RAID tower I bought here, but NewEgg limits orders to 3, so I had to buy my 5 drives elsewhere. It seems to me that NewEgg could raise the quantity limit when the drive order accompanies a RAID tower.

Overall Review: My 5 star rating relates only to my experience with the drive thus far. I did not take a star away for the 3 per order limit because many folks only need 3 or less. Note my rating does not encompass reliability as too little time has passed. I'll update the rating if I suffer failures. As noted, I had many problems getting the new SansDigital RAID tower working due to poor documentation. See my review for the SansDigital TR5UT for details.

Pros: Have a pair of these in RAID 0 on a J&W Minix 890GX-USB mini-ITX mobo with Phenom II 910e under W7 Pro x64. Booting up in under 30 seconds from cold start (including normal and RAID BIOS), and zero discernible delay in loading applications... even PhotoShop.

Cons: Took forever to get them... pre-ordered on March 17 and waited 3 weeks!

Overall Review: For the benchmark junkies... 700+ MBPS read *and* write in HD Tune Pro 800+ MBPS read *and* write in ATTO 620 MBPS read/839 MBPS write via "winsat disk" command

Pros: Very attractive and well built. I finally got it working properly and am very happy with the end result, so I gave it 4 eggs for "end-result".

Cons: Supplied RAID adapter is awful. If i included the frustration associated with bypassing their adapter (which required getting things to work on SB700), I would have to drop my rating to 1 egg for "frustrating install."

Overall Review: The RAID host card would not work properly, and the software is amateurish at best. I ended up mating this directly to the SB 700 of my J&W MINIX motherboard. According to the supplier and conventional wisdom, the SB 700 "doesn't support port multipliers." I found out this is wrong, but the fix is counter-intuitive. In BIOS, I set the SB 700 for "AHCI." During a fresh Vista install, windows asks for a driver. I pointed it to the ATI RAID Driver (from the ATI Catalyst site), even though it is not required. The install completes, and Vista recognizes all 5 drives in the bay! Note I am using Vista Home Premium, and only the top-end Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate Vista builds (Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate Windows7 builds) support Dynamic Disks and spanning to allow treatment of all 5 drives as one big drive. Thus, I have 5 basic disks, and can't span them into one.

Pros: Does exactly what it says it does. It's very small, rugged, absolutely silent, and about zero power dissipation. It's ideal for my application where I'm squeezing a Mobo, 2 of these, 2x500GB HDD, Hauppauge 1212, 4x2 HDMI Matrix, Dolby Decoder, Corsair 750W PS, and 6x75W Audio amps in an nMedia HTPC 200B case! Besides, I'm tired of using primitive wheel technology in my computer builds :o)

Cons: If this drive supports Native Command Queing, I sure couldn't find it anywhere. Not that the 'Egg or anyone else led me to beleive it did... folks should just be aware of this as it affects its speed compared to other SSDs with NCQ.

Overall Review: This has been an education, and I'm still not done yet. First, I combined two of these as a RAID0 on my SB700 hoping for lightening boot. It WAS really fast once it got going, but the AMD RAID BIOS was taking so long to scan the drives that the boot time was just as long as with a single SSD! The time was just spent differently. Right now I'm seeing 30 second boot (J&W Minix MB, 780G/SB700, 4 GB RAM, 9350e) which is good, but since I have the other drive.... I'm now shopping for a really fast and affordable HARDWARE RAID card to see if I can get it faster. SOMEONE has to help this economy!