Rosewill RSV-S5 - 5-Bay 2.5" & 3.5" Hot-Swap Storage Encl. System - RAID 0 / 1 / 5 / 10 / 5 + Spare / Spanning / JBOD - 120mm Fan, Port Multiplier, Tray Design - Controller Card Bundle

Pros: It works with several different RAID options as well as pass-thru which allows it to function as a simple 5 bay enclosure if you just want that. Using it in RAID with Parity (Raid 5) with 5 WD 1TB 1001FALS with TLER enabled on them (strongly recommended). Recognized the disks and it was relatively simple to create the array and quick NTFS format it. To build the Array took 14 hours in my case. I've had NO issues with the Raid dropping drives or it failing randomly. And that is after transferring 3 GB of data and using it for streaming video/Music. Running with 32kb chunk and allocation unit size. PCI-E Controller has two estata ports so you can run a 2nd box. My second has been ordered and is on it's way. Adequate cooling with the fan in my warm room. It comes with all the screws for 5 drives.

Cons: Plain design with a bay door that covers the green activity lights. To open the bays, you slide the chrome piece to the right, something not stated in the manual and I was having trouble figuring it out. Easy once you know.

Overall Review: If using consumer HDD make sure you enable TLER or whatever equivalent setting for the drives. Otherwise the drives may fall out of RAID under heavy I/O. Use Advanced Raid Settings under preferences, and turn on Check Pointing. This is a must if you want to power cycle the box. Without check pointing when I power cycled I got 15 hours to rebuild redundancy with the raid running in reduced mode. With check pointing option on, it was 4 minutes to rebuild!!! So if you plan on turning the box off when not in use, I strongly recommend turning on check pointing.

Pros: Cheap external drive solution. Works as advertised, no compatibility issues with 1.5TB Seagate drives.

Cons: This is not hardware RAID. PCI-E x1 limits transfer speeds somewhat. Cages feel a bit shoddy. Rails are made of cheap plastic.

Overall Review: As mentioned above, the 1x PCI-E version 1 card included with this has a max transfer rate of 250MB/s. Therefore, reads from the array will not exceed that speed. Also, since this is software raid, parity/mirror needs to be written by the host OS. That will limit actual write speeds to about 125MB/s for mirroring and something around 167-200MB/s for RAID-5 (250MB/s * (n-1)/n where n is the number of drives in the RAID-5). Max transfer rate for eSATA is 300MB/s though so it isn't a huge deal. This is for storage, not for speed. I have this connected to a Linux host. Since there is no software program for the RAID card in linux, I had to set up software mdraid on the drives. There were no issues getting the drives to all show up on the Linux host though.

Pros: The unit works perfectly on linux. Used mdadm to configure a RAID-0 system with two 1TB caviar blacks (WD1001FALS). Gives about 120 MBytes/sec write speed and 118 MBytes/sec read speed with the 2 disks on RAID-0 (each disk gives about 82 MBytes/sec and 107 MBytes/sec resply) using 'bonnie++' on Ubuntu 8.04. Not bad.

Cons: As another reviewer pointed out, you need to keep the disks about quarter of an inch into the tray for the disk to fit in properly. Actually, screwing it based on the holes (rather, the first hole) on the side worked for me. The drive must go in fully (so that it connects to the SATA II interface at the back). The outer door is slightly flimsy and you cannot see the LEDs clearly once you close it (just nitpicking).

Overall Review: Just make sure you connect it through the PCIe port multiplier given and not directly to the eSATA interface (if you have one) on the computer. "Quick HOWTO : Ch26 : Linux Software RAID - Linux Home Networking" is useful if you want to set up software RAID on linux. As another reviewer pointed out, when you boot (after connecting through the PCIe card), the RAID configuration tool in BIOS will be able to see only one hard drive. Just skip that and go ahead. You will be able to see all the disks once it fully boots and loads the drivers (use 'sudo fdisk -l" to list the drives). BTW, I set TLER-ON (Time-limited error recovery for WD drives) on the hard drives before using them in RAID.

Pros: Can handle large amounts of external storage for a great price (vs slower usb options and more expensive hardware raid/NAS options)

Cons: None that I have found. This is software raid...but that's just getting what you pay for.

Overall Review: LINUX USERS: I was able to get all of my drives to show in linux. (Ubuntu 8.04.2 server in my case) I used a Sil3124-2 PCI-X card. However, upon first booting: That familiar screen after your BIOS that says "Silicon Image" or whatever and lists the installed drives only showed ONE of my drives. Also, only one drive's status light was lit on the front of the enclosure. With a little help from Rosewill support, I found out that if I ignored that and went along with the installation that by the time I got to the partitioner my OS drive and all of the external drives were visible, and the other drives in the enclosure had lit up. As I understand it, it is normal for ALL OSes to only see one drive until loading the driver, because the port multiplier is actually handled in the driver, not the card or the enclosure. (much like softraid in XP or 2003, except with this, you can't even see the individual drives until the driver loads!)

Pros: Easy setup. Includes ESATA cable. I'm using it as the expansion chassis for an HP EX470 WHS. It's currently populated with 4x 1.5TB Seagate drives. Flawless performance so far.

Cons: Useless manual. Power supply draws as much current as the server itself. A bit loud, but it lives in a room in my basement, so it doesn't bother me. For those using it as a desktop unit, it might be a concern.

Overall Review: A no-frills 5 bay ESATA chassis. Great bang for the buck and works perfectly with HP EX470.

Pros: - Relatively inexpensive - 5 drive bays w/ drive carriers - Comes with a port-multiplier card

Cons: - Does not have an industrial build quality

Overall Review: I bought this enclosure in Jan 2010 to house 5 Seagate 1.5 TB HDs connected to an Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS 32-bit server and configured using software raid-5 (mdadm). The initial setup was eady, ableit long to form the raid-5 array (which should be a given using this setup). The enclosure and the array has been running without a problem ever since. Never a problem is dropping the array or disks, array rebuilds on reboot... nothing. Oh, and for those who like to be critical of consumer grade or brand <insert name here> drives, I've never lost a drive either. If you just getting started or need a simple expansion, I highly recommend this unit.

Pros: - Easy to use. - Works out of the box in Linux on a recent kernel. - Works with 3TB drives.

Cons: - Included controller is not very good. I used it for about a week before picking up a 4x PCIe 4-port SATA controller based on a Marvell chipset. I never bothered trying the actual RAID functions of the included card after reading the reviews on here, especially since I was already using software raid (mdadm). It also puts both eSATA ports on a single PCIe channel which could be a problem if you were to use 2 of these on a single card. - I felt stupid about this, but opening the drive trays was not very intuitive. You have to slide the silver part to the right and the black part (the handle) will pop out so you can pull the tray out. - The door on the front hides the drive lights (which are not very good and hard to see unless it's very dark) when closed. It would have been nice to have the drive lights on the outside of the case instead of the front of the trays.

Overall Review: Definitely a great way to add more hard drives to a maxed out server, but I wouldn't recommend it if performance comes first, since all 5 drives will share a single SATA II connection that maxes out at 300MB/s which 5 decent drives will hit with ease. Wasn't an issue for me since I was just after more capacity but is something to be aware off. It was very difficult to find out before-hand if they supported 3TB drives, so I ended up just taking the chance and can happily report the drives worked just fine. One egg off because of the included controller, otherwise is a fine product.

Pros: Great Device, solid built..

Cons: can not get the raid adapter software to work with windows 7 pro 64 bit