Vantec NST-640S3R-BK Quad 3.5in SATA to USB 3.0 eSATA External Hard Drive Enclosure With Fan

Comment:
I've been shopping for Raid units ever since I could remember. The problem with every Raid is the possibility of failure; failure of the hard drives, failure of the raid unit. Granted that is why we choose a Raid that has redundancy which allows us to replace a hard drive with another with no loss in data. However the problem of a unit failure causes all the data to be lost since we cannot simply mount the drives in your computer to extract the data unless you decide to use mirror in which case the format of the hard drive can be removed and mounted on any PC and read instantaneously. Hence I bought two of these units thinking that if the unit fails, I can recover the data by moving the raid 5 formatted hard drives over to the backup unit and voila... instant readability. Currently I have four 2TB drives mounted in one unit and formatted as a raid 5 giving me 8TB with 6TB usable.I then mounted 4 single drives in the other unit and by using the USB 3 connection, I was able to access all 4 single drives individually. I do not have a multipart esata connector and even as a single raid 5 unit, the esata port did not show up as a single drive so I'm not sure whether my new Shuttle would support esata with >2TB drive.With both Vantec Units connected on 2 usb 3.0 ports, I proceeded to fill my raid 5 unit with the backup data from the individual single drives from the other unit.I managed to get transfer speeds up to 100MB/s depending on the size of the files. With smaller files, my transfer speed dropped down to 20MB/sI am very happy with this cheap Raid enclosure as it offers the ability to use it as a raid unit or as a cheap enclosure for 4 single drives. As time progresses, I am hoping to fill the other Vantec unit with 4TB drives giving me 16TB raid 5.For the price of the unit, it is an excellent way to get raid.