Question 1

This appears to be the CFI eSATA unit. Is the door perforated with many small holes to permit airflow from front to back? If so, that is very good. The one I owned had the perforated door, and the drives were never more than a couple degrees warmer than room temp.

Accepted Answer

Correct, This has air holes on the front to permit the free-flow of air driven by the cooling fan in the back.

Question 2

Does the esata bracket come with a low profile option?

Accepted Answer

Yes

Question 3

Will this unit work with a Windows 2008R2 Server? I am trying to find an external raid 5 (4) bay enclosure to use as a backup device.

Accepted Answer

I cant verify for certain but in my experience with this and other drive enclosures like it the key thing is does the OS support the newest/best driver for it. For instance on an older machine running windows 7 i didn't have the newest driver for my onboard sata contoller which caused only the first drive to show up. sorry i can't give a yes or no with win server 2008r2. Also just as a side note in my experience with this and other devices like it the RAID functionality is worthless aside from 0 and 1 modes because it relies on the OS to do all of the processing etc. I think that is true as a general rule for all cheap sata cards and built in sata interfaces/chipsets. Hope this helps a little

Question 4

I'd like to use this as JBOD enclosure with a bunch of green drives. Will they be allowed to spin down when not in use?

Accepted Answer

From what I can tell, the drive(s) are always spinning while the Enclosure is in use. When I hot swap one, I still feel the resistance to tilting the centripetal force a spinning disc would provide.

Question 5

I'd like to use this basket as external 4HDD RAIDZ storage under FreeBSD, what do you think about it?

Accepted Answer

I've had it for about 6 months. I use it as a JBOD with 2 TB HDDs and am well-pleased with it so far. I would recommend it. It's very easy to use.

So that you know, I plan to buy another.

I hope this helps.

Question 6

Can you use different sized drives from different manufactures at the same time with this product and still have it function in a RAID configuration?

Accepted Answer

No,  I purchased this for local backup purposes, but was unable to get it to function at all.  Rosewill has some great products, but this isn't one of them.

Question 7

How many ports (for the drives) are *PHYSICALLY* on and wired with traces on the sil3726 port multiplier card that is *inside* the drive chassis? Not including the external port on the back of the chassis, and not including the controller card that goes in the pc, and not caring about space in the chassis for drives. We need to know *ports on the multiplier card*.
The sil3726 is a 1 port in plus 5 port out chip, so do we have all 5 ports, or are only 4 ports present and wired with traces on the multiplier card?

Accepted Answer

There are 4 drive bays in the chassis. There are two e-SATA connectors on the controller card, so you can use one card to connect two external chassis. There aren't any additional connectors on the controller card, so  you can't add drives internal to the computer that has the controller card.

Hope this answers your question.

Question 8

Hi.  My cooling fan became very noisy.  Can someone recommend a place to buy a replacement?  Thanks.

Accepted Answer

This one worked great for me: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0AJ3RF5564

Questions & Answers