Sans Digital TowerRAID TR8M-B - 8 Bay SATA to eSATA JBOD / RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 5 Enclosure

Comment:
I have one of these hooked up to a Linux machine (running 2.6.18-128.1.16.el5PAE). The adapter card (SiI3132) was detected out of the box. and both ports found. Provided drivers appear to be binary only and may add extra functionality, but the OS base is limited, and I'm using it in JBOD mode (from the array perspective) so the to kernel default driver worked. Internally the array shows up as 2 buses with 4 device on each, so you have to plug in both ports to use all the disks. Construction is good. The drive trays feel light and plasticy, but when you put a disk in them then they're nice and solid. Ensure you push the drive bay in all the way before closing the handle, though! Disks run nice and cool. Hot-swapping a disk causes the kernel to rediscover all the disks on the bus; this doesn't seem to cause dataloss but scares me a little. I have in this machine 5 by 1Tb disks in an mdadm RAID5 array. Reading data from this appears to be around 80MBs

Comment:
Great value Don't like the SI chipset chosen for port multiplication, took way too much digging around to find out what I was even using to know what was compatible. I'll save you the trouble of looking, it comes with a SiI 3132 PCIe card and uses a SiI 3726 for each set of 4 bays. The finish is slick, scratches somewhat easily and there's a gross blinged out blue LED fan on the back. Doesn't draw too much current, even under full load. I haven't noticed any drawbacks with respect to speed and have consistent 30MB per second transfers over 1Gbit LAN using NFS with the enclosure serving an 8 member zraid2 pool. If that means nothing to you, you won't notice many drawbacks either.

Comment:
Bought this to use for my file server, performance isn't the best in the world. PCI-E card included with eSATA is useful, but it is a SiI 3132 chipset which is known to have issues. Low quality parts.Annoying blue LED that lights up my whole room if the lights are off. Case seems kind of flimsy. Might buy one of these again if I wanted external storage, but probably not.

Comment:
This thing is worth every cent! I was looking for something exactly like this and it has really impressed me. Clean and simple to install without a hitch, blue back led fan might not be everyone's taste. Drives are very easy to install.Did not have 1 problem till now. Comes with great long black eSATA cables.