StarTech.com 8-bay USB 3.0 / eSATA Removable Hard Drive Enclosure Review
by Ganesh T S on August 11, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- USB 3.0
- eSATA
- DAS
- StarTech.com
Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks
The single 120mm fan had no trouble keeping the temperatures of the SSDs inside the enclosure within acceptable limits during the course of benchmarking. Obviously, hard drives require more airflow. Thankfully, the ventilated front panel and the drive tray ensure this. That said, having two fans (one behind each set of four drives) could have resulted in a better thermal solution. The 2x 80mm fan approach adopted by Mediasonic may result in better airflow, but it does result in higher sound levels. There is a trade-off, and StarTech.com has gone for the quieter single fan solution.
The table below presents the power consumption of the unit recorded under different scenarios. Note that the eight disks mentioned in the table below are all 240GB Intel SSD DC S3150 drives.
| StarTech.com S358BU33ERM 8-bay Removable Hard Drive Enclosure Power Consumption |
|
| StarTech.com S358BU33ERM (diskless, powered on, connected via USB 3.0) | 28.43 W |
| USB 3.0 128K Sequential @ QD4 - 8 Disks | 38.23 W - 39.67 W |
| USB 3.0 4K Random @ QD32 - 8 Disks | 39.23 W - 39.56 W |
| eSATA 128K Sequential @ QD4 - 8 Disks | 38.02 W - 40.05 W |
| eSATA 4K Random @ QD32 - 8 Disks | 37.05 W - 37.71 W |
The StarTech.com 8-bay hard drive enclosure with hot-swap support lends itself to multiple use-cases:
- A simple JBOD enclosure for users with large amounts of data that need to be accessed from a single machine
- A safe storage place for old hard drives
- Enable easy decommissioning and/or data recovery from most common COTS NAS units
Touching upon the last point further, I would like to point readers to our article that dealt with data recovery from a failed NAS. In that piece, I had spent considerable time attempting to free up the SATA ports on the motherboard. Since then, I have attempted data recovery from the disks of multiple NAS units. I soon found that things were greatly simplified by slotting in the disks in an enclosure like the Mediasonic Probox or the StarTech.com 8-bay DAS that we are talking about today. It enables data recovery even on machines like the Intel NUCs which don't have any spare SATA ports. This could be achieved by connecting the DAS via eSATA or USB 3.0 and reassembling the RAID volume from within the OS. In essence, a high bay-count DAS unit is an indispensable tool in the arsenal of any power user.
The product does have scope for improvement. Though visual inspection made the unit appear strong and robust, we found after a few days of use that the front panel had loosened up considerably and could almost be taken out of the chassis (only held back by the wires behind the bottom of the front panel). It would be nice to have better build quality and materials. The hard drive trays are very good for keeping the member disks ventilated. However, the drive tray opening mechanism is not exactly intuitive. The final improvement aspect that needs to be addressed is the power consumption. In particular, consuming upwards of 27W at idle with no disks attached appears way too high. The product page also doesn't make it clear that a SATA chipset with port multiplier support is needed for accessing multiple disks in the array over an eSATA connection.
Coming to the pricing segment, we find that the comparable Mediasonic Probox comes in at $270. The Probox was recently updated to support SATA III drives at 6 Gbps. The StarTech.com S358BU33ERM is priced at $392 on their website. However, Newegg and Amazon are selling the same unit for $311 and $309 respectively. For the premium over the Mediasonic Probox, the consumer gets a better designed chassis with easily accessible ports that also happens to operate quietly.
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BMNify - Wednesday, August 12, 2015 - link
you could probably do it with the £99 Orico 9548RU3 Aluminum 4 Bay USB3.0 3.5 inch Hard Disk SATA HDD RAID Enclosure Bhttp://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Orico-9548RU3-Aluminum-4...
alpha754293 - Tuesday, August 11, 2015 - link
Given that you seem to found a system/setup that works better for you - do you think that you would be able to re-test the Mediasonic Probox because I have a feeling that some of the speed limitations (like around 180 Mbps regardless whether it was USB 3.0 or eSATA) might be due to hardware/infrastructure/setup limitation and might not actually truly represent the performance of the enclosure?digitalgriffin - Tuesday, August 11, 2015 - link
I really don't see the benefit of spending this much. There are better and cheaper alternative external enclosures with 4 bays for < 1/2 the price for each. For example the Media Sonic HF2-SU35L handles 4 bays eSATA & USB3 for $99/each. Get two and you are at 2/3'rd the price of this one unit. If one enclosure fails you aren't SOL.Get a PCIe eSATA card with two ports/2 channels. This will offload some of the burden
These mega NAS builds are for professionals only with serious NAS storage requirements. (Business web servers, data archives, code archives, photograph databases, etc...) Again not really useful for 99.5% of the readers here. Cool to look at, but not practical for the vast vast majority of us.
herky - Tuesday, August 11, 2015 - link
I'm not sure what the Media Sonic HF2-SU35L is, because it doesn't exist. Perhaps the HF2-SU3S2 is what you were referring to? In any case, it may be cheaper but it CERTAINLY isn't better. The build quality isn't good, and far worse, the transfer speeds are awful compared to the Startech product. If you want dirt cheap, get 2 of the HF2-SU3S2. If you want something that works well, get the Startech product.As the review noted, this isn't a NAS device so I'm not sure why you are ranting about them. This is a DAS. It seems to me YOU don't need one so you don't think anyone else does either.
digitalgriffin - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
I know the difference between a NAS and a DAS. Most towers are more then capable of holding 10+ drives.If you honestly need that much storage space then chances are you are running a server farm for some medium to large business. In that case you want redundant backups (failover). So running something like this on a desktop environment isn't practical.
If you need more then that then you are going redundant failover NAS and adding on a DAS to that NAS when the NAS runs out of storage.
And you are correct it is a HF2-SU3S2. I never claimed it was better. Just that is was a cheaper alternative. And if one hardware case goes down, then you aren't ham stringed with the loss of 8 drives versus 4. (If you set it up properly)
Now as to your argument that just because 99.5% of us don't need it translates as "I don't need it" would be incorrect. It's a NICHE product AT BEST. If you TRULY need this much storage, then you are a profesional with mission critical data, and you aren't going to buy a niche product without top TIER 1 support, warranty, and reputation behind it.
This does not have that. Sorry.
Gigaplex - Tuesday, August 11, 2015 - link
"The product page also doesn't make it clear that a SATA chipset with port multiplier support is needed for accessing multiple disks in the array over an eSATA connection."You really need to emphasise this more. It's actually rather common for eSATA ports to not support this, especially Intel ones.
dtgoodwin - Wednesday, August 12, 2015 - link
It would be nice to see how accessing two drives at the same time affects the speed. I have an old Silicon Image SATA 300 based 4-port multiplier box (Rosewill branded). One drive has okay speed, but if I start accessing two, the switching mechanism combined with the latency of conventional hard drives mean read or write speeds drop to around 25% of their original - with only two drives being accessed. I could imagine RAID on any of these boxes with hard drives would be pretty miserable. The eSATA card that came with mine had softRAID capabilities, but I immediately flashed it to the non-RAID firmware.dzezik - Wednesday, August 12, 2015 - link
completely stupid idea and useless logic with sata multiplexer.the enclosure would be thousand time more useful with two external sas ports (each port is for 4 disks). then you dont need any chip inside, only good quality wiring and your computer can control fully all 8 disks, you can get full speed 8x6Gb/s. eSATA and SATA is completeley useless. You can buy 8 port SAS controller for $100. if You need SATA for any sake then You can use SATA disks, or You already have SATA then You can use SATA disks, SATA disks are compatible with SAS controllers. but it is good idea to buy SAS disks instead SATA, the price is almost the same, I mean the same model with SATA and SAS are only 2-5% differrence in price. if You prefer very low performance disks like WD-RED then You stick with SATA, but all 7200 disks are available with SAS and SATA. please remember SAS are not only faster (full duplex, SATA is half duplex - cant read and write at the same time) but are more solid, accept longer cables and have more advanced error correction.
experttech - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
So if I move all 6 SATA drives that I have in my computer case to a DAS, will I lose any data or will Windows show up these 6 drives as though they were attached to the internal SATA connections in my case? Also is there one connection from the DAS to the computer case? If so, wouldnt operating multiple drives in tandem be a problem since the available bandwidth (USB 3/ eSATA etc) are limited?Jorsher - Friday, August 14, 2015 - link
This looks like a neat product. Typically I would avoid things from brands that aren't well-known, and that would include Star Tech, but...The only item I've purchased from this company was a 25u 4-post server rack for my home setup. Their packaging could be improved, as two arrived with over 50% of the parts missing. Of course, the fault lies with the couriers (one attempt with UPS, one with FedEx). As far as the rack itself -- it was a great price and while it is a no-frills rack, it's very well-built. It's holding a large rackmount PSU, a filled 24-bay storage enclosure/server, two switches, rackmount PDU, patch panels, and even a monitor and keyboard up top and is very sturdy. I will consider their other products in the future.