Customer Reviews

Cavalry 2 TB USB/eSATA RAID Disk

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

 

 

Connected the eSATA cable to my HR21 receiver and began recording HD movies and programs flawlessly. The only complaint is the anoyingly bright lights on the front panel.

When I installed my drive into a Dell 8400, Pentium 4, 3ghz, 4gb ram, Windows XP computer by eSATA the unit would beep and continue to beep until I turned it off. I sent it back and got a replacement; same thing. I contacted Cavalry support and they said that sometimes the drives get damaged in shipping and they had me reset the drive (push button) and the drive re-built itself. After the reset (took about 9-hours) the drive would still beep most of the time, but not all of the time, but for a long-time. I checked out the Cavalry web site under troubleshooting and found that if the drive will not stop beeping, one of your drives appears to be defective. I sent that drive back also. Better to be poked in the eye with a sharp stick than to get two defective drives. Try something else. Note* I did not purchase this drive from Amazon.

I use this drive in Raid 1 for my digital photos. The drive is a good value for this purpose.

If you have a spare SATA port in your computer, this drive comes with all stuff necessary to hook it up in the esata configuration, and you don't have to buy anything else. However its fan is fairly loud all the time, even if the computer itself is turned off. I find it a little annoying at times. This is the only reason I didn't rate it with 5 stars.

I have been using this drive for about 6 weeks and it seems to work well. It has had no issues and even looks good. It's a little loud from the cooling fans, but nothing I can't live with. The software documentation could be better, but overall I'm very satisfied with this drive and would purchase again.

I received the unit in a timely manner and connected the cable only to discover that though advertised, it will not work with Mac 10.5. So I called customer support who asked me to find a friend who had MAC 10.4 to reformat it or I could ship it to them. I don't know anyone who has the old OS so while they figure out the problem I shipped it back and was told that if I fed-ex it back that they will do the same to get back to me. Well after many phone calls to find out what happened to the unit, I am told that it was bad and that they had to replace it and send me new unit. Fine, but here I am still waiting for it 3 weeks later. The unit may work someday but don't expect it do so for you out of the box. So I ended buying a more expensive unit locally and I should done so in the first place to save frustration, time, and waiting for weeks on end. Good luck to you........................

Just a warning that the product description is wrong. It arrived configured for RAID 0, which provides no redundancy. One the big selling points for me was the redundant disks and although the product description says it will ship with RAID 1 that is not correct.

Also, the included utility isn't very intuitive and required a lot of playing around with in order to get the unit properly configured for RAID 1. The manuals are poorly written and incorrect on many details.

I would only order this drive unit if you are very familiar with the Disk Management suite built into Windows.

EDIT: It appears that this drive will not function if another external USB drive is connected to the same system. Drive will come online and go offline repeatedly. Can't recommend at all. Zero stars.

I WOULD NEVER BUY CALVALRY PRODUCTS OR RECOMMEND THEM EVER AGAIN!

I originally started with a Cavalry 4TB raid box CADA-SA4 which was a total nightmare in itself. Within 8 months of owning the drive, I had to send in the PCI to eSata card TWO times as there was once a recall (it had already stopped working by this time), then the second time my PCI to eSata card just stopped working with constant "delayed write failed" messages from Windows XP. After that, cavalry suggested switching to their PCI-e card which worked for all of a few weeks before I started getting the "delayed write failed" error on Windows XP again. After that, (still within the first 8 months of owning the drive) I had to send the actual drive in THREE more times before they acknowledged that the drive was faulty and replaced it. This was a HUGE inconvenience as this was one of my main working drives in my music studio and each time I sent out the cards or the raid box, we would lose hours of valuable work time. However, I was sure that it was a faulty PRODUCT rather than specific model since it obviously was not tested thoroughly enough and thus just not ready for public use. After my 2nd CADA-SA4 also started giving me the same "delayed write failed" error message, I asked for a full refund through Cavalry. They are a small company and within that 8 month period of dealing with them, there was only ONE customer support person and the position had been re-filled (I probably would quit too in that job) THREE times within that short time. Customer support was extremely slow (VERY LONG HOLD TIMES) and most times calls were met by a voicemail (which would then take 1 to 2 DAYS to receive a call back.

In short, even with my unusually terrible customer support/product experience, the only solution they were willing to offer (after explaining to ANOTHER customer support person for about 5 days in a row and a total of at least 100 hours on the phone with them in 8 months) was to replace the CADA-SA4 with two 2tb USB/eSata disks (pictured above). After only 6 months of using the cavalry disks, I found them to be VERY loud (unusable in my music studio where we record) and one of them failed TODAY in the exact same way that jonpaul described. Beeping, clicking, blinking error light, and does not mount.

I WOULD NEVER BUY CALVALRY PRODUCTS OR RECOMMEND THEM EVER AGAIN!

I bought one of these back in January of this year (2010). I was tired of going through so many other external drives and potentially losing data. It seemed I would lose an external drive in less than a year's time. I found this drive and loved the idea of the raid ability. I felt if I lost a drive or the controller, my data would be safe.

In March of this year (2010) I bought a second one for work to use. I used it to store Ghost images on the drive.

This month, July 2010, both drive ran into trouble. The one for work died first. It was newer, only about four months old. In the middle of using it, the green power light started to flash and the drive became inaccessible. We emailed Cavalry, who responded very quickly and issued an RMA for the device. It took them about two weeks to fix the unit and get it shipped back. They were very easy to work with. I don't have the drive back yet at work, but I should have it any day. I am not sure if our Ghost images were salvaged or not, or what exactly Cavalry did to fix the unit, but my guess is the controller for the raid went out.

This same month, July 2010, my Cavalry at home started acting up. I came home one day and both blue hard drive LEDs were on solid, like something was accessing the drive, except nothing was. I powered down the computer, then powered off the drive, cycled the power and let the drive boot back up. It came up fine, but as soon as I turned on the computer, both blue hard drive LEDs came on solid again. I left it for a few days then came hope the other night to see one blue LED off, but the red error light on. I had to cycle the power on the drive to get the red error to clear, but then both blue LEDs came back on.

I contacted Cavalry again via their customer support email. They again responded very quickly, told me this was not normal behavior on the drive and to get my data backed up as soon as I possibly could. They said to apply for an RMA as well. I applied for the RMA and even though the message stated 24-48 hours for notification, I received my RMA approval in about an hour. I will be sending the unit back this weekend to Cavalry.

I really had high hopes for this drive and, while my data on both drives was likely ok as long as I took the hard drives out and mounted them in another enclosure, I am disappointed that yet another external hard drive has failed. This seems to be common for all external hard drive units. I have had Iomega, Eagle, Fantom, Buffalo, and now Cavalry. All of my drives have died except the Eagle and the Buffalo. In contrast, in the last ten years, I have only lost two internal hard drives on computers at home, and one of those was right out of the box. The other started to fail and I was able to Ghost and transfer the image to a new hard drive, without losing any data.

Maybe this is just normal for external hard drives, maybe due to unclean external power, who knows. It just seems internal hard drives have a much longer life expectancy than externals, which somewhat defeats the purpose of an external drive.

Hope this helps others.

I have owned this model for about 6 months now and it is working fine. I have seen an issue when switching over from eSATA to USB as the fan starts up noisy then settles down.

I have moved this hard drive around from place to place and it has done fine. It is a bit noisy, but not THAT bad. I purchased this because I liked the 500GB drive I purchase from Cavalry previously. I would personally recommend it for backing up media files (I have gigs of music and video). The eSATA connection is great for transferring files as well - much quicker than USB. All in all I am very happy with my purchase.

Bought this thinking it will be a safe storage for the files. Turns out the hardware/firmware is terrible: 1) sounds like a vacuum; 2) the error light would come on every time I turn it on; 3) it rebuilt its RAID-1 for no reason; 4) it's eSATA interface causes my Vista x64 to freeze and I had to do hard reset.

Emailed their support asking about the error light: completely ignored my 1st email (for a month - did they do this intentionally so that I can no longer return this product?). I emailed again, then they said nothing is wrong and I could try RMA but they won't promise my files will stay intact.

Overall, very disappointing purchase.