Question 1

The newegg unboxing / review video has a max of 2TB drives, the description says a max of 4TB drives.  Which is it?  This is important, I want to put 4TB drives in it.

Accepted Answer

I installed four 3 TB drives as one array
and four 4TB drives as a second array
for a total of 28 TB.

System works great with no installation problems.

Love it.

Question 2

Can i install 4 drives now, and then expand the storage (in raid 5) one drive at a time in the future?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can expand whenever you want.  All of the drive bays are hot swappable, so adding and removing drives are simple.  As far as adding to existing raid configurations, that is up to you.  The hardware supports it.  I am only running with 4 WD 1T black drives in a raid 10 configuration and will add 4 4TB later.

Question 3

Will this unit take .5 TB 3.5"  hard rives?

Accepted Answer

While I can't 100% confirm it can because I don't have any of those drives, it absolutely should. The drive bays will accept 2.5" or 3.5" drives, and everything about the hardware and software setup indicates that you can use any size drive up to 4TB. If you plan on mirroring/striping, though, just be sure that you have multiple drives that are the same size.

Question 4

Could I use this item (Rosewill RSV-S8) with SnapRaid, a software raid salutation? I see it has 2 SATA ports, does that mean I would have 2 separate pools, or would the whole tower be able to be combined into one?

Accepted Answer

There's no reason why it wouldn't work. The enclosure itself is basically just two port multipliers (top 4, bottom 4), and all drives will be reported individually to the PC. Without doing anything, you'll be running them as JBOD, and whatever software RAID (SnapRaid for example) you go with can do with the drives as it pleases. The RAID card that comes with this also has its own RAID software, but I don't know how good it is...

I actually did not go with this enclosure, myself, just because it seemed to bug out and drop one or both of the multipliers occasionally and cause my RAID array to have to rebuild. Along with the other reviews with similar issues, that was enough risk for me to switch so another solution (there are relatively few decent options on the market, so I got two smaller enclosures).

Question 5

what is the best operating system to use with this item.  and best min pc spec ?

Accepted Answer

Hello, we use them for work we have them on windows 7 pc's and Mac OS X 10.8.5 and 10.7. Raiding it in 5 has produced mixed results. Raids in 0 & 1 have worked flawlessly. You have to use both ports on the esata card. We have also used 4tb drives 3tb and 2tb. I'm a much bigger fan of the Venus t5c because it's usb 3.0 and the software works everytime, downside is it's only 5 drive bays.

Question 6

Do I need to connect to both E-SATA ports to access all 8 drives?  My system does not have a spare PCI-E slot, but I do have a single available E-SATA.  Would that mean that I'd be able to use this as a 4 drive tower?

Accepted Answer

You can only connect a max of 4 drives to a singe connector. 
The layout is two identical 4 drive boards one above the other. I actually jettisoned the two boards and have all my drives connected directly to an Adaptec 71605 16 port PCIe board which is very fast indeed.

Question 7

I lost my orginal Sil3132R5 PCIe x2   does rosewill have a replacement at newegg?

Accepted Answer

You should be able to use any SATA controller that supports Port Multiplier.  If the controller does not support it, only one drive per backplane will show up.  Newegg sells a variety of controllers that support it and they are not that expensive.

Question 8

All I need this tower to do is hold my 7 2TB drives (5 W/D, 2 Seagate), and be able to plug this tower to my laptop via USB to be able to play the movies on my drives. Is this possible? Is it as easy as installing the drives, plug tower into laptop, see content on drives via 'My Computer'?

ASUS R500V
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

Thank you.

PS: I am not network nor computer savvy.

Accepted Answer

no, this device requires 2 eSATA ports, 1 for the top 4 bays 1 for the bottom.

You may be able to find a USB eSATA card, but "your mileage may vary"

Question 9

trying to find out if the drivers available are Windows Server 2012 compatible?

TIA
steve

Accepted Answer

It works on my Windows 7 machine, which was pre-2012, so while I can't promise it, I consider it highly likely.

Question 10

Are the trays sold separately (for ready-spares)?

Accepted Answer

Yes.  Here is the item:

N82E16816132022

Make sure you get a different RAID card for this unit, the one that comes with is not very good.

Questions & Answers