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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Sans Digital RAID Towers any good?

Brandon J.F.

Brandon J.F.

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I need more storage and I'm looking at options. Sans Digital RAID towers seem to be reasonably priced. Do any of you have any experience with them?
 
I have an MS4UT+(B) that is as slow as molasses in January on Jupiter. 25/25 Mbs/s in RAID 5. It is plastic. I'm returning it.

I have an older, much more solid eSata 4 bay tower, port multiplier JBOD that I RAID 5 with my RocketRAID and I get 100/150 Mbs/s. I'm going back to this setup.

Cheers -
 
I've had great luck with them and high point rr cards
8 bay sas 650mb+ sec
Actually about to sell my rr2722 and tr8x-b with 1.5 tb seagate for a grand and get a 16 bay sans digital and rr
 
I have a TR8X on one of my workstations connected via an ATTO R680 host. Works great, nice and fast. The pros of the setup are that it was about as cheap to set up as it could possibly be, the enclosure is nice as it's not port-multiplied, all 8 SAS/SATA channels are piped straight through to the drive bays. ATTO card handles all the RAID functionality and interfacing... The cons are that the enclosure build quality isn't anything special. There are no onboard electronics, management or any other amentities. No redundant power, no nothing. It's just a box to put HDD's in that has a nice straight-through connectivity via two mini-SAS ports at the rear.

I have not tried any of the Sans-Digital RAID products with onboard RAID controllers or any of the host adapters they sell... I've heard mixed reviews.
 
Thanks for the replies everyone. It really does seem like the quality is hit or miss depending on the model you get. If I get one of these and set them up in a RAID 5 can I add disks to the RAID as I go without losing data? For example start with 4 drives and then add a 4th, 5th, 6th, etc as needed. Will it rebuild the RAID to add space each time I add a new drive?
 
I have a 5-bay model from these guys, it does RAID-5 internally. I bought it because I wanted something large cheap and simple. Mine has an internal RAID controller so it shows up on any esata system as a 9TB raid. I've had very few problems with it but the throughput is only about 125mb/s which isn't great. This isn't a problem for me but I see how it could be for some.

The fan is a little loud but could easily be replaced with something quieter. While the build quality isn't the best I've seen, it's pretty good and the drive trays in my unit are solid. I've had no issues with it physically which is nice. Some of the cheap drive bay options out there can be pretty terrible in terms of build quality so you have to be careful.

For the ones that don't have an internal raid controller, you can do online capacity migration with most controllers afaik, so you could start with 4 disks and scale up to 8 or what have you. This will require having the RAID plugged into an internal controller card in your machine and not just an esata cable, so be sure to keep that in mind.

hope that's helpful!
 
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