MobileSTOR MS4UT+B 4 Bay USB 3.0/eSATA Hardware RAID 5 Tower (Black)

After losing both primary and backup at the same time (what are the odds?), I went out to get RAID 5 on my system as I have in my servers.I've looked at every external RAID 5 solutions out there and found that this gave me the best bang for the buck. First of all, it's the cheapest one I can find with built-in RAID controller, so it's not just a JBOD. It comes with both USB 3.0 and eSATA, not that I'd use USB with this thing, but at least you have that option.As for the performance, I consistently get around 180MB/s read AND write. RAID 5 gives me the combination of speed and redundancy - can't beat that striped set with parity. I'm using 4 WD 1TB Green drives.I almost didn't buy this because of the bad reviews. But after reading what others were saying, it's clear that they were written by people who don't know how to set up their computer nor understand RAID. It's set up as an internal hard drive on my hackintosh and I can even boot from it. The only thing that annoyed me was that I had to set the RAID 5 even though it said RAID 5 was default.So happy with this thing that I'll probably buy another one.

If you fully populate this product, you must set the fan on its highest setting. This results in noise. Even at the highest setting, four drives being accessed for a lengthy transfer will result in higher than recommended temperatures.The connection is unreliable. I've used other USB3 products, and never had one drop off like this. The first time was after nearly a year of infrequent use for backups running RAID5 fully populated. One day during a backup it just dropped the connection and all data was corrupted and irretrievable. I took two drives out, went to RAID0, purchased a second one of these, and mirrored them for reliability. Three days later, I go home to find that this first one had dropped its connection. I tried adding it back after cold powering it, and it was corrupted. Then I formatted it to a non-RAID standard fs, and began copying my data off the second one... That one was corrupted. At this point, I'm sending the second one back, tossing the first one in the trash can, and calling this a two hundred dollar lesson.

The default RAID 5 settings appear to work just fine. But, I really wanted to set it up as a RAID 1, with strict mirroring.I tried RAID 1, RAID 3, and RAID 5.My RocketRaid 4 port eSata card would NOT see all of the drives, except in RAID 5.If I tried any other configuration, the RocketRaid bios could only see the first drive in each enclosure.I purchased 2 of these units, and eventually wanted to purchase 2 additional units, for a total of 4.Using RAID 5, I managed to get the RocketRaid controller to see all of the available disk space in both units.Again, any other configuration, was useless.It appears as if the manufacturer may have tested the functionality under RAID 5, as that is the default configuration, out of the box.But, it appears as if they just threw the other RAID options into the box, without testing their functionality.As I've only had the units up 24 hours at the time of writing this review, I can not comment on their reliability.I do LOVE the front panel, as it is very informative, and I love the ease of disk insertion.It's just a shame that the units only allow for a fractional use of their potential.

This is a really great product. You have to purchase up to four identical hard drives, but they slide right in. I say 'up to four' but you really need all four drives to make the unit shine. You paid extra $$ for the RAID 5 function, and by design you need at least three drives for that to work. It's easy to set up, and it's been working great for a few months now. I purchased four 2TB drives, and now have 6 TB of storage available. It's very quiet, and just does what it says it will do.

This unit is not comparable with Windows 8.1 it will put hard drives to sleep during file transfers. Microsoft has confirmed that the controller used in this unit is not comparable as it passes bad info to the OS

Setup with four 3TB drives in a RAID 0 configuration via USB 3.0 on Windows 7. Worked great with two hard drives for many months but after adding four 3TB drives, the whole unit powers down intermittently and shuts off. Powering the unit back on takes care of the issue, but with the unpredictability of the power downs, this may create an issue to use for any reliable data source.

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