Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2 Black 4 Bay External Enclosure

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Great little enclosure. Only filled with 2 drives right now, 1x1TB and 1x3TB, as the 1tb one was an internal drive, and the 3tb was in its own enclosure, but my cat knocked it off my desk and the case shattered. Luckily the drive survived. This case is great, although it doesn't have raid support built in unlike its brother... the raid version, windows 8 does have a built in raid setup tool that will let you create  raid 1 or raid 3 from external drives. So I saved a few bucks, got a case, and still able to setup a raid1 like I wanted... once I get more drives with the same capacity of course.It's a bit noisy, even on the lowest fan setting.

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After only 2 days of ownership I'd buy this again in a heartbeat. Although the speed is inconsistent at times, it works flawlessly in all other aspects. No problems with Sync switching, all modes work. Just generally super easy to use and highly recommended.Will update  later if anything changes.

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I did my research and realized that "Rev. 3" of this box will work with a 6TB HDD. I purchased this and 2 Western Digital Red 6TB disks. The parts arrived and I assembled them. The Mediasonic Enclosure was quite easy to setup and I encountered no problem. I connected the unit to my ASUS N550 notebook using the USB 3 interface. The 6 TB disks were recognized by Windows 8.1 immediately and I was able to format both drives. Now the unit is connected via eSATA to my QNAP TS-412 NAS. It is used as a backup of the NAS (RAID 5).I would definitely recommend this unit as an enclosure. Like many users noted before, the throughput of the eSATA interface is higher than the USB interface.Please remember that this is an enclosure and NOT a NAS so don't have your expectations set too high!

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On USB 2. I got average transfer price of 16MB/s (reading from a 640gig WD Caviar black 7200rpm)Same procedure with a USB 3. card and got 41 MB/s.That doesn't sound like ൒x quicker than usb two.". They usually overrate points anyway. You Can\'t generate spanned disks with USB 3.. You have to use an eSATA card. I went into drive management and tried to combine (span) my two, 2TB and 1TB HDD together to show up as a single HDD, it went up till it said the stuff about converting to dynamic disks, but right after that it stopped me.

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I've had this unit for about two weeks now, and love it.Only problem was when installing the drives, I have 3 500GB Seagates, and 1 1TB Samsung drive. When I first installed them I put the 1 TB drive in the 4th position and it did not show up. After I swapped it with the 500GB drive in position 3 it has worked fine. Not sure of the reason why this occurred.Sometimes when rebooting the computer or after having the Probox shut down, it will switch from USB to eSATA, not find any drives and then shut itself off. Switching it to USB during booting fixes this.I got mine on a Price Match for $109.99 - great deal from NCIX !!!I'm tempted to buy another one for dedicated use on my WDTV Media Player.

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See Other thoughts See Other thoughts Appear the future: Help all brand of three.five" SATA I / II hard disk drivesTransfer price up to 5.0Gbps through USB three.Transfer rate up to three.0Gbps through eSATA We All Know (The average men and women) the Sata II transfer rate is three.0Gbps, How this unit will speed up the HD to five.0Gbps by means of USB three., if not assistance SataIII? Thanks at advance.

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Got some problem at the start. I did lose connexion from the unit very often, but solved it when i updated my ASUS P67 motherboard drivers

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Smaller than I thought. four-mode fan switch, low, mid, higher, & auto. High is really powerful and loud, a lot of air flow! Mid is decent, and low is virtually silent. I leave it on auto (same as low, sound sensible). Sync mode is not for backup! You have 3 sync selections, blue turns the device off 15 minutes right after you shut down windows, orange puts it in sleep mode, and off is off (meaning you have to turn it off manually) It will not turn back on with your Computer (HOWEVER, I have not attempted setting the sync to sleep mode, I would picture it may well turn on with windows then.Waiting on my USB three. card. On USB two. I got typical transfer rate of 16MB/s (reading from a 640gig WD Caviar black 7200rpm)Installing handles to the front of the drives was swift & uncomplicated. Aids acquiring them out. Yes, the plug on the side is a bit annoying, but the box is a bit smaller in width than a mid-size ATX case so it will fit on top rated nicely. The plug is L-shaped as well.Blue lights on front could be bothersome for some people today. Looks like "Night Rider" the way the lights span across.comes with a little screwdriver, usb three cable & eSATA cable. Go to their website and read the forums! BOX WILL Help 3 TB HDD's. They weren't out however when they printed the packaging for the box, claims Mediasonic.I had a query about the box not reading my Spanned disks. I posted queries on their forums and they got back to me that night (Sunday also).I moved two of my 2TB drives that I had "Spanned" into the box and it wouldn't recognize it. I created the span in Win7 drive management. I just need to delete the disks and generate the span again.

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Ư to N/A post, plusEffortless setupUp to 2TB drivesPower Sync: Power off/Suspend in synchronization with PcPort Multiplier assistance and or USB Switch interfaces employing a single buttonLow speed fan is barely audible, good for a HT space, and enough for my four ea 1.5 TB green drives Just wish the Power Provide plug was on the rear of the unit rather of the side. Not seriously a huge con but interferes with placement.I have the older model and the drive access lights are large and way to bright for a H/T space. Had to cover them or it looked like I was in a seventies disco club. Not positive if this is the identical, would be nice to have a leading cover come with unit. Applied with Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 and SW Raid5 (mdadm/lvm2) as a movies, music, image server, and so on. and it functions excellent.note: use hdparm to turn off write cache if employing SW Raid mdadm/lvm2. sudo hdparm -T /dev/sdX (sdX or hdX, sata or PATA, X being drive letter)Rosewill RC-219 2 port esata with multilane support. (support 2 Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2 four port enclosures for a total of up to 16 TB using two raid separate arrays MD0/MD1) Note:I bought the one with USB 2. help eight+ months ago for about 贄. (Plus ษ for Roswell card) It would be far better to run off the USB for faster R/W transfer rates if MB supports USB3. ports, not to mention 5+ of these supported rather of 2 and a PCI Express port. Adore the Energy Sync feature for power financial savings, when I suspend the server and send a WOL it is prepared inside 12-15 seconds)Pleased camper and Newegg Loyalist.

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Perhaps I'm just becoming a drama queen with a 1-star overview. After all, I put drives in this and they all operate fine over USB. There's a lot that, so far, works properly about this product. I am giving his 1 Star for two causesɅ) The fan in my unit, even though nonetheless quiet, has a defective clicking noise. It was definitely anything that requirements to be replaced. It's an 80mm fan, I've built computers for 15 years, easy to swap in a new one particular-- right?two) Mediasonic decided to use an 80mmX80mmX20mm fan with a two pin connector in the back of this. This is NOT the normal type of 80mm case fan and is consequently incredibly incredibly tough to discover and replace. MOST 80mm situation fans are 80mmX80mmX25mm with 3-pin connectors (the 3rd pin is information for the fan's RPM).There is NO Reason *whatsoever* that a normal 80mm fan could not be utilized on the back of this. It would give customers hundreds of options to replace the 80mm fan in situation it was defective. Rather, I spent far more than an hour sifting the online looking for the bizarre 80mmX80mmX80mm 2-pin fan format utilized in this product, unable to find one and unable to discover an adapter. The nonstandard format of the 80mm fan was just completely poor considering. I can't think such a excellent product was torpedoed by such a uncomplicated oversight. Rule # 1 of manufacturing is to make your most volatile, least-dependable elements (e.g. fans) effortless to replace.

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Straightforward to set up and use. I really like the disk handles that it comes with. Directions are uncomplicated to follow. On auto-fan mode, it stays at the lowest fan speed. Even the medium speed is pretty quiet (highest speed is fairly loud). Drive temperatures at lowest fan speed range from 33C-37C. Desires to use USB connection by default, even when eSATA cable is what's connected. Getting it to switch isn't as intuitive as it appears. Immediately after obtaining port multiplication to work with my sil3231 card, I nonetheless had trouble finding it to use the sSATA connection. You have to hold the Interface button down for ӱ-7 seconds ahead of it'll switch.

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Bought it to hook up to my media player. Easy set up, taking no more than 5 minutes and it works like a charm. Great design and its operation is almost fool proof. Unit turns itself off as expected when I power off the media player, very convenient. At this price point, you can't go wrong with this although the fan is a little too noisy to my liking.

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Really nicely produced. Effortless to place drives in, for the most component. Quiet fan on lowest two settings.Excellent adequate bundle of cables, exceptional packaging.USB 3. operates fine (Win 7ኜ, employing embedded three. controller on MB.)eSATA functions far better than USB 3. as far as I was concerned, but I was forced to use a Sil 3132 PCIEx card that was port-multiplier capable. Port multiplier requirement is a deal-breaker for some, but a non-concern for USB three. use, so think about that. My mainboard eSATA would only see the very first drive.The "hot swap" drive removal handles are a tiny cheezy, and you have to use their particular screws (supplied.) You're not going to want to be swapping drives all the time.The LED lights are annoying, and there's nothing you can do about it. The "Sync" function is for turning the device OFF, and only OFF. It will not detect technique power ON, so you will be forced to turn it on manually, or leave it powered on 24ǝ. This applies to Sleep mode, too. I missed that small piece of info when getting this, and it forced me to reshuffle some of the drives with my Win 7 Libraries on them. Any installled programs, etc., will be affected in the similar way.Cheaper at [another on-line retailer named for a significant jungle river that starts with the letter A] when I bought mine.

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Effortlessly handles my 4 x 2TB drives on eSATA and USB3.. I tested both interfaces and obtaining more than 100MB/sec sustained reads on both interfaces! I am using this for a Windows Property Server (WHS) and it is great because it does not do RAID, so that I can let WHS manage folder duplication rather. I intend to purchase an additional one of these to expand my WHS capacity in the near future. None so far. Documentation was a small weak, but not tough to figure out.I did believe it was broken at a single point since its default setting is to power down if it does not detect a connection to your Computer. When I switched from USB3 to eSATA, I had to tell it to modify interfaces (button on front) or it thinks its not connected and powers down. You can also turn off this auto-sync power setting as well. When I got that figured out, its been best! This is one of the handful of enclosures I could come across that does not come with some kind of low-end RAID controller. When working with in WHS, it is preferable to *not* use RAID and to let WHS do its folder duplication instead, so this is great and low-cost for that objective.

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Outstanding box for small storage networking solutions, nicely created, fantastic seeking, great cost, intuitive design. You just cant beat this box for what it is - If you will need 4 bay with the e-sata and usb three. this is the box for you - supports 8 T.B. no troubles and fan can be either automatically controlled or manually controlled at any speed you wish so you can maintain drive temps cool if you can stand the noise - I keep mine on fan speed 2 and the drives dont even get warm - fan speed 1 sounds like a jet taking off, but it definalty moves some air - This speed would be great for these super hot operating drives that fail due to heat problems... None actually, but if I had to pick a single when inserting a new drive in "hot swap" mode - backplane resets any disk operations that are at present tasking. Would be nice if they included a ethernet port. (Actually they do a additional expensive configuration.) But I just thought I would mention this as simply a "would be good" feature - but you dont get a Rolls on a VW spending budget.......

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Compact and sturdy produced of excellent high quality components I should of just gotten a rotten apple from a really fantastic tree trigger mine arrived somewhat glitching, going offline for no reason, this began correct out the box so i think it could have been dropped during shipment, our faithful carrier firms these days are getting to rapid rather than delivering safer shipments, I have seen two packages dropped in the final few weeks here at my household I have a different unit by the very same firm, The raid version and it is the ideal unit i have owned! simple illustrated cd-rom offers effortless setup and even provides info on the unique raid alternatives that the unit is capable of!

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I use this with 4x2 TB Seagate low power drives and connect this via firewire 800 to a Macbook pro (late 2008). Effortless to setup, excellent sustained data transfer rate, fans are quiet on the lowest two settings I couldn't get raid ten to perform, it would just default to raid five.

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It is a high quality enclosure that is well worth its cost. None. Answering to N/A ("Question for the PROS"): First of all, no SATA HDD really reaches its documented data rate. Secondly, this is a 4-drive enclosure. Supposedly, if you access additional than 1 HDD simultaneously, then getting the USB three. can make it all worth though.

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Don't confuse "Maximum Transfer Rates" of a bus (SATA or USB) with that of the hard drive feeding it. Challenging drives max out at about 100MBps, or 1Gbps. (SSD's are quicker of course). Even multiple drives (like in this unit) won't be limited by their individual SATA II connections. If you've got a very advanced RAID controller with lots of cache and multiple drives attached, and IT is connected to the system with SATA II somehow, *Then* SATA II would be a choke point.(it would be so much easier if I could submit a diagram of this)Right now, no difficult drive (and few SSD's) are limited by SATA II. Devices in this price tag range will be limited *eventually* by SATA II, but by then you'll want to upgrade it for other causes Ɠ, four or 10 TB drives, smaller and economical SSD's, and so on) Only four drives, no support for 3TB drives (no 10TB drives either!), poor placement of the power jack (the side). BTW, you won't actually get 5Gbps across USB three; it's a shared bus. Just like no 1 ever got 480Mbps on USB 2., you're lucky to get 300. USB three will just let existing tough drives and SSD's run at (or close to) their fastest speeds. Then faster devices will come along, and we'll get USB 4.Hope that assists.

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Nice enclosure. Fairly affordable compared to other enclosures. Nice 80mm fan. Holds four drives up to 2 TB every single Not a con for the box, but you cannot use dynamic drives more than a USB

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Other reviewer stated "Must have port multiplier should be on box" - accurate, and I agree. Should also be in Newegg's description. But it's not a Con for this *device*, just the way eSATA works Ɣ drives on one cable = port multiplier required)His other comment about the USB three not operating correctly - he could solve this by searching at the incredibly forum he mocks. His adapter probably just needs a driver update. USB three is new, these issues occur. Even the link to the driver in the forum. Um, not certified for 3TB drives but? Seriously, for the prices of the MediaSonic gear, what do individuals anticipate? Free of charge onsite installation? Superior instructions? Come ON :) I have the USB 2 + eSATA version, works fine as soon as you figure out its quirks. Came back to order this 1 since I have USB three now. Will use the "old" 1 as a backup to take offsite. Just had to respond to the other reviewer initial.

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On data pours I am finding a sustained write speed of 20.two MB/s to a single drive making use of USB2.. That number really should be slightly higher, but not a major deal. I like the enclosure style with the exception of the location of the power cable connection. The automobile fan speed feature is nice and works as advertised. It is really quiet. The drive handles were effortless to attach and all required tools were included. A USB3. and eSATA cable had been included. All in all, a quality product. LED lights are way too bright. Power cable connection on the side which is annoying. I had to turn off Legacy USB Storage in my BIOS to get my method to boot with it attached (eVGA X58 SLI Micro with latest BIOS). When I shut off my pc, the device powers off, but when I turn it back on, I have to manually turn the device back on. Not a large deal for me, but could be for other people. I am employing Microsoft SyncToy to synchronize two drives in that enclosure to 2 other drives in the enclosure for a low-cost mirroring solution. Microsoft does not permit OS-level mirroring on USB drives (can't convert a drive on USB to a dynamic disk). This is possibly for the ideal as dynamic disks are a discomfort. Gave it four eggs as I received a defective 1 on the initially shipment (Newegg took care of it quickly), and the concern with it not powering up with a bootup.

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Uncomplicated setup, great instructions for hardware, appears to be built pretty properly, fan speed manage with auto-temp sensing, very good attention to detail on smaller items like the handles have and it doesn't appear ugly. The metal frame (placed in front of the drives on the inside immediately after installation) could be a bit greater but I realize why they produced it like that. I just wish it was slightly much easier to place back on. The rails to slide the drives in on aren't really tight and side brackets could have fixed it but it's not poor if you pay attention. Despite the minors cons, I am Extremely content with this. I am working with it with USB3. and so far it's great! I literally just popped in the drives and then plugged it in. I do come across the placement of the power plug a bit odd, but it's not a deal-breaker by a lengthy shot. The lights on the face are fairly cool but I suspect I might tire of them and have to resort to some black nail polish to dull them.For eSATA users, no it does NOT have a port multiplier built in so be aware of that - but honestly if you don't have USB3. you can purchase a card here on Newegg for about ษ. I switched from my eSATA external to this simply because USB3. is less difficult to deal with. So far it's been fantastic.I recommend this to anyone who merely wants to have external storage that is simple to deal with. Simply installing drives AS separate drives is Really simple. If you are seeking for RAID solutions this might not be for you.I love this and I may well finish up getting another soon.

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Good packaging style. This item could of had so substantially potential, but falls way brief. Poor instructions, Ought to have port multiplier ought to be on box. This is my second one in 2 days. THE USB three IS Genuinely USB two.... the cable they give you does not function on usb three port. Their fix is for you to use a usb 2 cable. This will function in the usb three port. So, now you're operating at a usb 2 speed. MediaSonic is not a organization tha manufactures this. They just industry this item. Net web site is quite poor. If you have a opportunity read the forum on the site..Makes for a funny read when they have to lock out some forums. HUmmm why? Spend the dollars, obtain some thing else. IF you are pleased with just usb two. Get the usb two box and forget about esata or raid or usb 3. YOU WILL NOT BE Pleased.PS. I will be sending my unit back and invest the cash on other technique.

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- Attention to detail, capabilities, and packing of the unit are great to above typical for the price.- USB 3. and eSATA support (eSATA port need to support port multiplier)- USB three. and eSATA cables are included- Fan control- LEDs- Ease of use and setup- Exceptional newegg customer support with the RMA - The front latching mechanism is not reliable. Applying a down and inward pressure on the tab situated on the bottom of the front cover though concurrently releasing the spring latch appears to function without having the need to use a screw-driver. - Poor quality cooling fan with non-common min-2 pin connector- The finish on the case could be simply marred if not careful- USB 3. cable could be a small longer- Energy cable connection on side of enclosure is a bit annoying- Directions are sufficient - poor composition and/or translation to English I am rating the item a two eggs, which is generous given the time I wasted setting up the unit and the need to RMA a new item. I did not have the chance to assess longevity and reliability of the unit. A fluid dynamic bearing or dual ball-bearing fan would be preferred over the low-expense/low good quality sleeve bearing fan that currently ships with this unit.It will be tough to locate a compatible replacement fan to match the 2-pin header and the opening among the circuit board and enclosure housing appears to narrow for a two-pin to 3-pin fan adapter cable. My final choice to maintain or return the replacement enclosure may possibly be based on my capacity to acquire replacement fans. Given sufficient time, I believe excessive fan noise and/or fan failure is inevitable with this enclosure.