Sans Digital TR5M1 TowerRAID 5 Bay SATA to eSATA

Comment:
This is a great unit for the price. Worked well with Win7 64bit without a glitch. I do wish it had 6 bays as I'm doing a mirrored RAID, which then can only utilize 4 (2 mirrored pairs) and the extra drive is set up as a 'simple' drive. I'll be purchasing another one of these soon.

Comment:
I purchassed two TR5M's and both have problems with restoring redundancy in a RAID configuration (both RAID 5 & 10). The drivers will restore the redundancy of the array everytime that you reboot,even if you shut down the OS properly. This restore can take between 30 and 50 hours. Tech support is no help. Their fix does not work. The restore process works the drives to death and makes the system useless.

Comment:
Good unit for the value. Raid software does NOT support windows 7. Support said they are working on it but not at this time. Had to make them stripped drives in Win 7.

Comment:
This product is of excellent quality, beautiful on desk, very easy to fill up with sata drives, very easy to remove drives, one click they are out or in, very easy to conect to the computer. I intend to build a library of DVDs with it but I can not say at this moment how the unit will behave since I have not started filling the drives with information yet.

Comment:
Had some difficulty getting the RAID controller recognized, but after upgrading firmware everything worked perfectly. Have created RAID1 and JBOD disk sets, appeared in OS (Server 2008) as expected. The tower itself is a bit 'cheap', but all around good value for money.

Comment:
I have 1 at work and 1 at home right now. I like this unit so much I am getting another for our server room at work. It really shines when used on a linux soft-raid. I can create raid 5 array with 1tb drives and format to reiser filesystem in about 5 min. Ready to rock! Give it a try!

Comment:
The controlling chip for this raid setup is in the dual multiport card (per SansDigital tech). Consiquently the system is limited to running on the computer wherein the card is installed. --After setting it up raid group I called tech support to ask why it did not work when attached to another computer w/ eSata port. -- If you plan to have it attached to only one computer, it's a nice setup. I installed five 1.5tb HHD. With Raid5 setup I had 5.45tb available. SansDigital tech support is very good about helping set it up.

Comment:
So I got one of these with 5 1.5tb WD green drives, and setup in a raid 5 array on a Mac Pro tower v2.1... decided to grab a Highpoint Rocketraid 2314 4x pci-e card to go with it (included card is 1x). I knew the performance wouldn't be to great compared to a true hard ware raid system, but was still a little disappointed by the ~100mb/sec read ~50mb/sec write...one of the drives died after a couple weeks so I got another and the recovery process was pretty painless really, and the raid system did continue to operate with one of the drives removed.overall I WOULD recommend this if you are looking for a fairly cheap storage/backup solution, but not if you need anything particularly fast. Took about 12 hours to dump 1TB of stuff onto it.

Comment:
I have a Dell studio XPS desktop using a Win 7 64bit operating system. Installation was smooth - can get the updated drivers for the e-sata contoller and the software. Need to push the hard drives in the box well to ensure proper connection. No problem so far with the RAID configuration or function.

Comment:
I agree with sparky. I bought two each of the Sans Digital TowerRAID TR5M enclosures and I'm quite happy with their value and features. I put 5 Seagate 1.5TB drives into each enclosure and I have to say - the RAID unit creation and formatting of the drives (7.5TB total each, 6TB useable in RAID5 config) takes about two days. So be ready for that. Do not try to create a RAID unit and immediately format it - wait until the creation is done - about 1.2 days or so. Then do the format, one drive at a time. If the RAID unit creation fails more than twice or the format stays at, for example, 25% for more than an hour the drive is probably bad - I had one bad drive and this is what it did. If you are going to use the unit in WinXP 32-bit you will have to break up the 6TB RAID array into 4 units (WinXP 64-bit of course is fine with a 6TB drive). The unit creation software is a little clunky - you cannot enter fractional TB (i.e. 1.99 TB) and entering 2TB exceeds the Win32 limit. I used 1TB fo

Comment:
I slipped three Seagate 1.5tb drives into the SANs box, installed the included card and ran the software raid install. Everything worked the first time. The unit is lite weight. The HD trays were simple to use and better connection to the HD was made rather than a tray less unit that I tried where the HD did not always engage. The fans are quieter than the PC that it is attached to and you can only hear the fans from the back side which I normally dont see. I plan to purchase another one when they get down to $150.