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Sans Digital TowerRAID TR8M-B 8 Bay SATA to eSATA Port Multiplier JBOD/RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 5 Enclosure (Black)

Brand: Sans Digital

16 ratings

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Eight 3.5-inch SATA hard disk drives to two eSATA Port Multiplier interfaces. Accesses eight hard drives using only two cables.
Supports JBOD, Spanning, RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 5 with spare in two volume sets via software utilities.
Cable-less backplane design support hot-swappable SATA I and SATA II. Bundled with 2-port eSATA PCIe 1x Host Bus Adapter.
Supports Plug & Play for easy installation. Compact enclosure with dust-free cover.
Support PC, Mac, and Linux. Please note that the host adapter card is based on Silicon Image chipset, which currently only support up to MAC OS

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Product Description

The TowerRAID TR8M-B is an 8-bay storage enclosures for high capacity storage needs. With built-in ventilating protective screen front panel, both units utilize cable-less backplane-design to support up to eight hard drives. Hard drives are installed on easy access hard drive trays for simple insertion and removal. Hard drive cooling is provided by a large 4.7-Inch cooling fan located on the back of the units. The TR8M is a compact RAID tower uses only two cables to connected eight SATA drives utilizing the latest SATA II port multiplier technology. Using the bundled two ports eSATA PCIe adapter, the user could easily access eight hard drives via JBOD mode, or two different sets of RAID 0, 1, 1+0 and 5 with spare. Units are available in black (TR8M-B) and silver (TR8M) finish.

Product information

Product Dimensions

5.5 x 13.4 x 13.4 inches

Item Weight

19.65 pounds

ASIN

B001LF40RM

Item model number

TR8M-B

Customer Reviews

16 ratings

3.0 out of 5 stars

Is Discontinued By Manufacturer

Date First Available

April 2, 2004

Manufacturer

Sans Digital

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Customer reviews

3 out of 5

16 global ratings

5 star		20%
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3 star		20%
2 star		20%
1 star		20%

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Cuong Viet Do

Tempermental unit that's good once you get it going

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 28, 2010

Verified Purchase

Decided on this unit because of good value. Unit overall runs well once it's set up. Getting it set up is another story all together.

Finally got it running on a Dell PowerEdge 1800 server running Windows Server 2003. Configured unit with eight 2TB Western Digital drives.

Here are the problems:

1. Bundled Silicon Image card: 1) doesn't work with Dell servers (that may more a problem with Dell than the card); and 2) cannot create partitions larger than 2TB. After many attempts with the bundled card, I gave up and ended up buying several different eSATA RAID cards. Through trial and error, I finally got the the Highpoint RocketRAID 644 card to work in my Dell server and recognize the TowerRAID enclosure. Was able to configure as a RAID5 partition with 14TB of space

2. Not sure if it's the TowerRAID enclosure, the RocketRAID 644 card, both, or something else, but the TowerRAID drive would freeze if I copy large quantities of data (e.g., >200GB) directly from the server's internal drive to the TowerRAID drive. Seems that the high data transfer rate freaks out the drive system somehow (despite the enclosure's 3GB/s and RocketRAID card 6GB/s rating). Copying to the eSATA drive from a NETWORK drive (i.e., limited by gigabit ethernet speed) works just fine

Net, net, it's a good and economical solution if you have the perseverance to get through the trial and error to get it to work. Beware if you have Dell server (if you do, try installing the card in the last PCIe slot). Also beware if you're trying to create a >2TB partition (you may need to get a separate 64-bit card)

One person found this helpful

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MDS

Great Enclosure, poor controller card

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 10, 2011

Verified Purchase

The four stars is for the 8 bay enclosure, the controller card gets a 0/5.

The enclosure was packaged very well. There's a plastic film on the case to prevent scratching, and there was substantial padding surrounding the enclosure to protect it during shipping. Inserting and removing drives is very easy. All necessary cables are included, though it does seem like the connectors could latch a bit more securely.

I have the enclosure sitting horizontally in my entertainment center. For those wondering, the bottom is painted black, so this doesn't look too bad, though the 4 large rubber feet that are now on the side do detract from the appearance. The only real issue with turning this on its side is that there are no standoffs on the side, so some of the ventilation is blocked. I've ordered some extra rubber standoffs for $1.44 that will hopefully solve the problem: StarTech.com system case feet - 4 PACK ( RUBBERFEET )

Each drive has it's own 2-color LED for indicating drive presence and activity. Each of the 2 eSATA connections also has it's own LED indicating connectivity to a computer. There's also a power LED on the front of the case. The LEDs are not on the individual caddies, but at this price, that's not really to be expected.

There are a couple drawbacks to this case that prevent me from giving it a 5.

My biggest complaint is that the disk caddies do not have smooth face plates. For many people, this might not be a huge issue, but I'd like to put labels on the drives and most of the surface that is visible while these are in the enclosure have ridges. A label is not going to stick very well, so I'll be limited to just a couple characters as opposed to the full disk UUID and description of the data on the disk.

The next concern is that the power switch is right on the front. In a product that is meant to be on all the time, and that many people will put in their entertainment centers, a rear power switch -- far removed from the inquisitive hands of children -- would be far preferable.

Internally, there is a bright blue LED that shines out the back of the enclosure. While this might be cool to some, it causes my entertainment center to glow 24/7. I need to see if I can easily disconnect this.

Finally, there is no lock on the case. That might not be something that cases at this price point typically have, but as a lot of people put these in kid-accessible places, a lock would be a huge advantage.

The controller card that came with this is junk - it won't allow you to present individual raw disks to the OS without creating JBOD volumes. I shy away from hardware raid solutions because of all the problems migrating arrays from one controller to another. If the RAID controller dies, and you can't find an exact replacement, you may lose all the data on the disks. Consequently, I prefer Linux software RAID where migration to new computers is very easy. This controller will not expose raw disks to your operating system. Instead, you must create a JBOD volume for each disk, and the controller writes a small amount of metadata to the disk. Because of that, I have no idea if I could eventually plug one of these disks into another system without issues

For now, I'm using the eSATA connectors on my motherboard which don't have this problem. Using those connectors and my motherboard's controller, the raw disks are exposed to the operating system. I'll eventually try to find a better controller card because one of my built-in eSATA connectors is unfortunately on the front of my HTPC.

On top of the issues with presenting raw disks, the controller card doesn't seem to be supported in Ubuntu 10.10. I'm sure I could have eventually resolved that, but as I decided to use my motherboard's eSATA I did not investigate further.

-------The above was written 3/10/2011---------
-------8/5/2011 update below-----------------
Because of the issues I list above, I'm not using the controller card that shipped with the enclosure. I've been using the enclosure for about 5 months now, and haven't had major issues. I'm also not really working it hard, though. I really only use one drive on a daily basis, one drive for weekly backups, and the other slots only occasionally.

The one annoyance I do have is that if I lose power, my bios hangs detecting the drives on restart. I have to power off the enclosure and computer, boot once (to Ubuntu 10.10), power on the enclosure, mount the drives and reboot to get things working. If I properly power down/restart my computer with the enclosure powered on, I have no problems. This only seems to happen after power outages.

It could be an issue with my bios or with the enclosure. Well, I suppose it's actually an issue with my power company.

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Computer guy

Just my 2 cents

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 12, 2011

Verified Purchase

I have 4 of these boxes two hooked to a machine running XP and another two hooked to a machine running windows 7 Ultimate.

I have had no problems with them except once in a while I lose a whole row of harddrive that dont seem to be recognized by the system on my windows 7 box. I had to upgrade to the Rocket Raid 4 slot controller for space issues on the motherboard but I am using it for only JBOD and not RAID so I dont have alot of the technical RAID issues that most have had with RAID support for Windows 7.

I have some quirky issues sometimes that happen which might be software related becuase sometimes just by re-booting I dont have problems but it does happen enough that it worries me a bit and its only one of the boxes not all of them so who knows.

Update as of 4/24/2014
-Ok I have had these for some time now and I still now and then get the issue of the system not recognizing the drives then I have to play with the connections and things but it usually works eventually. But one thing I notice is that the fan or power supply gets very loud sometimes. I dont know why then I have to turn it on and off again.
Again I would not recommend using these units as a real RAID enclosure because of the drives sometimes dropping off from being recognized by the system and if you are using it for RAID thats the last thing you need but if for JBOD they seem to be ok.

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Olpdog

Not useable with Windows 7

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 2, 2010

Verified Purchase

The product probably works great with a PC not using Windows 7. I have a Sans Digital tower hooked up to a PC running Vista and it works great. I assumed I'd get the same results for a PC using Windows 7, I was wrong. The software that comes with this does not work with Windows 7. I was in contact with the software manufacturer who agreed the software was not compatible with Windows 7. He sent me a link to a trial version that "other users told him made it work with Windows 7". I followed the directions and it did seem to work, initially. I noticed the following day that some of the drives had disappeared. After rebooting, the drives showed again, but would disappear in the middle of transferring data. Tech support was actually very helpful, there just wasn't a solution to fix the problem. It may be a great product if you are using an OS prior to Windows 7. If not, I would wait until they put out a product made for Windows 7.

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Sans Digital TowerRAID TR8M-B 8 Bay SATA to eSATA Port Multiplier JBOD/RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 5 Enclosure (Black)

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