Question 1

Do you have to RAID the drives, or can you use this with 5 separate hard drives and see the drives separately?

Accepted Answer

You can set this up as JBOD (just a bunch of disks) as well as RAID if you'd like.  If you are just going to use JBOD you can find a more inexpensive solution than this though.

Question 2

If I buy two hard drives 4 terabytes, the capacity of each disk is added for a total of 8 gigabytes?

Accepted Answer

yes, the total storage will be about 8TB if the tower is configured to use RAID-0.  that's the fastest RAID mode, but also offers you no data redundancy (that is, if one drive fails your data is lost).  if you use RAID-1 you will have fault tolerance, but only 4TB of usable space with two disks.  if you configure the system for RAID-5, you need 3 or more disks, you only lose about one disk worth of storage space -- and the system can also protect your data if a single disk fails.

Question 3

Does the RAID controller in this enclosure support 4TB drives?

Accepted Answer

I believe so. It says a max capacity of 20TB and it only has 5 drive bays

Question 4

Does this support expanding the RAID volume after resilvering with larger disks?
In other words; if I start with a 5 disk RAID5 volume with 2TB drives (8TB usable), and then slowly replace each 2TB drive with 5 4TB drives, could I then extend the RAID5 volume to be 16TB?

Accepted Answer

No it cannot be expanded dynamically. If you replace a drive with a larger one it will be rebuilt with the capacity of the smallest drive.

I started with one 5 drive Raid unit and when I could afford larger drives I bought another one, installed the larger drives and copied my data from one unit to the other. This is much the safest way to increase capacity as at no time is your data vulnerable to total loss if you have a single drive failure. I have now done that twice going from 1TB drives to 3TB drives. I now have three units! I started using these in 2011 and have not had a single failure of any kind, (including drives), running the oldest one of them 24x7.

Question 5

Is the USB 3.0 Iface supported on a Mac?

Accepted Answer

My tower is recognized by my MacPro Retina and seems to have full functionality on both Mac and PC operating systems (via Parallels) on that laptop.

I am using an external 7 port USB 3 hub between the two but that should not be affecting the situation - would only make things worse I suspect.

I am using it as a 4 drive Raid 10.

Question 6

anyone seen an address (web) for trouble shooting an issue ? 
My pc link (was) on but now it is not and can not see it in the os..

Accepted Answer

I bet you are using the eSATA cable.  Ran into the same issue, after troubleshooting it with the manufacture (three years ago?) I finally decided to go with the USB 3.0 cable instead.

Postulate the issue is systemic of the design.

Question 7

I have a Dell XPS 8100 computer. It has 16 Gb memory, an i7  860 @2.8 GHz processor, and (I believe)an H57 chipset. I want to setup a Raid 10 configuration using 4 Intel 530 240 Gb 2.5 inch SSD'S for the OS and programs. These SSD's will be installed in the tower.  The Sans Digital website states that enterprise drives must be used.  Any comments? I will have a WD 2 Tb data hard drive mounted in the computer itself.) The WD 2 Tb will not be part of the Raid.

Accepted Answer

Sans Digital suggests Enterprise Drives due to the amount of up time and access that will be done. The stress tests done on Enterprise Drives are higher and their odds of failure are technically less. You can use consumer drives in this system with the risk of possibility having to replace them sooner. I cannot comment on the use of SSDs for this as I am using traditional drives however I would imagine it will partition and operate as it should. I am not so certain that booting directly to the raid tower will be the fastest due to having to run the sata HBA card and how that will operate with your BIOS so that is another question to figure out. Will it boot to the external HBA card with your OS installed on the raid tower and also will it be as fast as running directly through the on board SATA III. If you are using the raid tower for rendering or the like for video or otherwise I would run an OS drive separately on board and then use the raid tower as an externally attached storage for rapid data processing. I use mine to process Cinema DNG files for editing and post production.

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