Customer Reviews

Cavalry Storage CADB-U32 Series 1 TB USB 2-bay JBOD Personal Disk Array CADB001U32

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When I took this out of the box, two things immediately struck me. One: how small it is. Two: the solid construction and brushed aluminum finish. I was really impressed by the quality and craftsmanship of this product. That might sound like a strange thing to say, but this drive looks and feels like quality stuff.

It's a full 2 inches shorter than a 1 TB Iomega drive I bought just 1 week before. I own several other drives with far less capacity, and this drive is even smaller than most of those. The size of 2 bricks stacked on top of each other (and about as heavy), this drive sits elegantly on top of the desk and doesn't take up a lot of space. It looks simple and classy with its solid metal case. On the back, the 5 cm fan can be turned on and off via a separate switch. The power plug is a standard round type insert, so if you somehow manage to lose it, you can easily buy a replacement. It doesn't have specially constructed pins that can break or bend.

As for reliability and speed, it is too early to judge. But I mainly bought this as a backup unit for my movies, so I am not being very demanding on the unit. I am very happy with this purchase and will recommend it to others.

** UPDATE - OCT 5 2008 **

I managed to outgrow the 1TB capacity and have acquired a few more 1TB single drive external hard drives in the last 3 months for my growing storage needs. With 1TB drives falling in price to about $130, I decided to hack this drive to see if I could make it into a 2TB unit. 2TB is the maximum volume size FAT-32 can support, and 1TB is the biggest sized SATA drive you can buy right now.

I'm pleased to report that this is very hackable and easy. Swapping out the drives take 5 minutes: just undo 4 screws in the back, slide out the drive bay, and swap out the 2 SATA drives inside with 2 new 1TB drives (each held in by 4 additional screws). Zip the patient back up, format and you've got yourself a new 2TB storage device. I formated this for FAT-32 because I want maximum compatibility in my diverse home network. From my Mac, formatting took about a minute or less. If you don't need this, you can go w/ NTFS.

Do this at your own risk, obviously, as this will void your warranty.

1 TB of potential storage. Actually it's two disks, initially set up to mirror each other, in case one disk bites the dust. In that configuration, you get "only" 500 GB of storage capacity, but a little more security. You can reconfigure it to use the full 1 TB if so desired. A little noisy, but since I use it only for backup, that's not much of an issue. The package didn't come with the instructions for reconfiguration, but a call to customer support quickly remedied that.

Other purchasers have complained about the loud fan so I was expecting the worst. I wasnt nearly as put off by the noise from the fan as other users have been. Its all relative, I guess. I am only using the drive to store music and video, so I only turn it on when I need to transfer data to or from the drive. It transfers data very quickly.

So far I am very pleased!

Nice cheap plentiful backup storage. I recommend it for this kind of use. I wouldn't use it as primary storage because the fan is very loud. There's a manual on-off switch to control the fan but it's not clear if the drives will or will not overheat if the fan is turned off, so I leave it on to be safe.

Fuzzy Wuzzy's Summary:
**** Recommended with warm fuzzies.

Previous reviews also mentioned that the fan could be turned off separate from the drives. But with the unit that I received, there is only one power switch, and turning that on turns on both the drives and fan. So now the fan has to run when the drive is turned on, which is probably a good thing given the compact form factor of the case.

The big red light that glows constantly on the front panel when the power is on, for some reason, always reminds me of the eerie HAL9000 light in the "2001: A Space Odyssey" movie. On some nights when I work in a darkened room, I almost expect it to blurt out: "I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen..." (begin "Twilight Zone" music)


***** Excellent 5-fuzzies feature ratings:

***** Who would have thought that one could buy 1 TB of disk space for under $200?!? Although I have only had this drive for one month now and do not know how reliable it will be, the price makes it a great buy for use in backing up files and/or to store bulky music/photo files on it.


*** Not-so-good 3-fuzzies feature ratings:

*** In reading all of the past user reviews, it is obvious that Cavalry has been varying the hardware configuration of this drive over time. While previous user reviews mentioned receiving a drive that was configured as 500-GB of disk space mirrored onto both drives in a RAID-1 configuration, I actually received my my drive pre-configured as one single 1-TB NTFS partition. But I actually wanted the configuration to be arranged as a 500-GB RAID-1 mirrored pair of drives, and the user's manual gave no indication of how to do this. A call to Cavalry's tech support ended up with me being on the phone with them for over one hour trying to figure out how to reconfigure this from being a single 1-TB partition to instead appear as a single 500-GB RAID-1 mirrored partition. Their tech support had me remove the ominous "Warranty Void If Seal Is Broken" sticker on the back panel, unscrew the back panel, and reposition a 3-pin jumper to cover the other two-pin pairing. This resulted in two separate 500-GB partitions, which was better suited for my needs than one single 1-TB partition, but after spending over one hour on the phone with Cavalry's tech support trying various jumper settings and re-partitioning on Windows XP, I could never get the drive to act as a singled mirrored 500-GB partition and finally settled for the configuration of having two separate 500-GB partitions. Cavalry's tech support person started sounding clueless when I told her that the switching of the pin jumper did not work, and she admitted that they have shipped varying configurations of this drive as time went on.

Some of Cavalry's other drive models have a dial on the rear panel that you can use to configure the RAID and disk layout that you desire. But with this drive, to reconfigure how the drive is partitioned, you have to unscrew the back panel. Cavalry's tech support then told me to stick the "Warranty Void If Seal Is Broken" sticker back onto the rear panel after I had gave up on trying to make it a mirrored drive configuration and just settled for having two separate drive partitions. So hopefully I will not ever have to dicker with Cavalry about having removed and reattached that "Warranty Void" sticker!

I bought two of these things to store my digital music collection on (which is approximately 1.6TB). These replaced my old set of 250GB LaCie drives. Clearly, I favor the more reasonably priced drives. The first thing that struck me relative to my old LaCie drives is how much more solid the construction of the drive housing on the Cavarly drives is. They are pleasingly designed metal boxes, which 3 lights on the front. The big green power light, and 2 red lights that indicate when the drive is being written to or read from. The fan makes noise, but I don't understand the expectations of people who buy a pair of drives and expect it to sound like a paperweight. The fan keeps these guys cool, and they are and streaming music most hours of the day. I have been using the drives for 5 months now, and they work just as well as they ever have. No problems. Nada. What more can you say? $250 for 1TB. Crazy cheap, especially given the quality construction. And no, I am not affiliated with the company, as I suspect when people gush about a product, hotel, etc. I just like the drives.

Plug it in and turn it on. It is ready to use in about 15 seconds depending on your computer speed. Mine came default working at 1TB so all I had to do was plug in and turn it on. Movies play perfect off of it but it is a little noisy (about as loud as a whisper). It is built like a tank compared to those plastic versions so it should take an accidental kick under the desk. One downside is the toggle switch is on the lower back of it.

Less than a year ago we bought the old Calvary CADB001U32 external harddrive, and I couldn't be happier. It is built like a tank, had USB and SATA connections...the only complaint (like others have listed) is it is LOUD when the fan is on, which makes the fan off option handy. Much louder than my 1 Terabyte Western Digital My Book external drive (which does not have a fan built in, not sure how safe that is). In any event, we liked the harddrive so much that when we noticed it dropped in price we decided to buy another one. When the unit came, what a disappointment! They changed a few cosmetic things, but most notably the case seemed less solid...which I know is just cosmetic. I also noticed there is no external SATA connection and no option to turn the fan off... Although the new fan is quite a bit quieter than the old one (which may be the reason why some say it is loud and others say it is quiet). I imagine it must be safe to run the Western Digital drives with a smaller/quieter fan, being that Western Digital My Books external drives don't even have fans (again not sure how safe that is, but I've had mine for nearly a year with no issues what so ever). Performance wise the 2 drives are identical...but I would give the old version 5 stars and the new one 4 stars for the missing options I listed above (no fan off option & external SATA connection). Like another reviewer I called Cavalry customer support, and they were absolutely no help. I had a very minor issue and their answer was just to send the unit back for a new exchange or a refund...when all I had to do was just initialize both drives. The old Cavalry unit was pre-formatted and my desktop automatically recognized it when I plugged it in, so that confused me for a second until I figured it out myself...which involved going into the device manager and formatting both drives, and then I was back in business. I can't believe they were going to have me send the unit back for that. I believe another reviewer had a DOA unit, and I wonder if all s/he had to do with format the drives as well.

I bought this product a few days back. And when I connected it, the laptop didn't recognize it. It was able to show the new hardware but no disks were being shown. I knew that the disks inside are inserted without the initial formatting. I called customer care and they asked me to open it and check the disk... It seems, warranty sticker doesn't mean anything... after opening it and formatting the drives one by one it is working good... it has got western digital hard drives inside... i liked the product overall... the company Cavalry should improve upon the process so that they don't commit mistakes. if somebody says their drives failed they should blame western digital and not cavalry... it is not much noisy as lot of people complain.... got for 190 bucks and it is a good price for a this purchase.....

I ordered this 1TB drive late in January, got it quickly, but it was DOA. Shipped it back, got the same kind again. This one works, it was a very good bargain. I can backup all my junk now.