[nycbug-talk] Rackmount eSATA Enclosures

[Jonathan]

On 6/15/2012 10:47 AM, Mark Saad wrote:
> Hi Talk
>  Has anyone had any experience with this drive shelf in FreeBSD
> Sans Digital Rackmount eSATA External Hard Drive Enclosure ER104CT
> http://amzn.com/B00365DWBK
> I want to get one and I am open to other options.

If you're buying this for a business I would have to say stay away from
it.  A 1 year warranty does not inspire confidence and they don't
specify the SATA controller so it's likely a Silicon Image controller;
supposedly they have gotten better but they used to be extremely buggy
and unreliable. The drive caddies also don't appear to have any kind of
vibration isolation either, it looks like bare metal all the way which
can cause problems.

If you're buying it for personal use it might work out okay. I have a
couple of cheap 5 in 3 tower enclosures that have worked okay in my home
tower but they are SATA pass-through not expander and I drive them
through an LSI SAS card. I have a piece of paper wedged next to one of
the drives because it vibrates and tends to get kinda noisy but ZFS has
saved my data every time so far. 5 drive failures in 5 years out of a
set of 10 disks, no data loss yet :)

Jonathan Stewart