Sans Digital TR5UT-BP 5 drive RAID enclosure

[MaxBurn]

http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid-plus/tr5utbp.html
http://www.amazon.com/Sans-Digital-TowerRAID-Hardware-TR5UT-BP/dp/B003YDZE0Q
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=16-111-145

I am waiting on my 5th drive so I took a look inside to see what the RAID engine is. I got this as a second place to store data as a sort of backup.

Not sure if I am going to choose a five disk RAID 0 or a JBOD setup. In theory either way if one disk fails everything is gone. Maybe I will even limit what I backup and do a RAID 5. Reviews seem to indicate the performance in RAID 5 isn't so hot as I would expect from something like this.

Jmicron JMB394

http://www.jmicron.com/Product_JMB394.htm
6-port 3.0Gbps SATA II interface
Native Command Queue (NCQ)
RAID levels: 0 / 1 / 3 / 5 / 10 / JBOD / CLONE
RAID 3 / 5 write-back cache to enhance performance
Supports more than 2Tera Bytes RAID drive
.Supports more than 2Tera Bytes RAID drive
.Supports on-line Auto-Rebuild
.Rebuild speed: 200GB/hour
.Rebuild proceed continuously between power cycling

JMB320 1 to 2- ports Serial ATA II Port Multiplier or a 2 to 1-port Serial ATA II Port Selector
http://www.jmicron.com/Product_JMB320.htm
I assume this switches the two SATA input ports on the main board to the 6th input of the above chip.

One input to the main board just goes to the back panel and the other goes to this:
JMS539 SuperSpeed USB to SATA II 3.0G Bridge
http://www.jmicron.com/Product_JMS539.htm

Sounds good on paper, will see what happens when I plug it in.

 

[MaxBurn]

The bundled card is a Highpoint Rocketraid 622. I don't know why they would include an additional RAID controller. Reviews out there don't like it very much, I'm skipping this card. Even includes a half height bracket.
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/usa_new/series_rr600.htm

Otherwise the accessories are excellent, all cables including a SATA motherboard to a PCI slot eSATA cable you can use instead of the above card.

 

[blakerwry]

I recently bought a similar, non-raid enclosure from sans-digital. Works fine. I assume the bundled controller card was chosen as it specifically supported SATA expansion, something that a lot of SATA cards do not support.

If you don't need the the expansion capability (which I don't think is applicable on the enclosure you have) and have eSata already, then feel free to ditch it - as you saw, it's nothing special.

 

[Mercutio]

I assume the bundled controller card was chosen as it specifically supported SATA expansion, something that a lot of SATA cards do not support.

Seems like a function that's only found on the cheapest controllers, actually.

 

[LunarMist]

Port multipliers.

 

[MaxBurn]

From what I read at intel the ICH9 and 10 with R and DO versions support port multiplier so I think I am good.

http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/matrixstorage_sb.htm

As this enclosure in theory presents as one big drive it may not even need that.

 

[MaxBurn]

My 5th disk should be here today.

First complaint is the manual explains spanning, clone and the various levels of RAID. Manual fails to explain what the differences are between RAID 1 and clone are. But then on the device they allow you to select clean, large, clone and RAID 3,1,10 or 5. Not really clear what clean and large are. I think large = span.

Not sure if I am going to do a span or a RAID 0. Either way everything lost with one disk gone.

 

[Bozo]

If you have the time it may be worth while to set it up in all it's modes. Move some data to it and restore the data.
Beats having to learn how when you need the data.

Clean sounds dangerous.

 

[MaxBurn]

Ah, some RTFM of the "detailed manual" provided on CD.

The CLEAN MODE storage policy enables each hard drive to be seen separately as one drive. When using a SATA host controller, CLEAN MODE should only be used if the SATA host controller provides Port Multiplier (PM) support. If a host is not PM-aware, only a single drive is presented (drive 1). No such limitation if using a USB host connection.

Basic port multiplier

The LARGE MODE storage policy concatenates a series of physical hard drives as a single large volume; resulting in a seamless expansion of virtual volumes beyond the physical limitations of singularly connected hard drives. TOWERRAID TR5UT/TR5UT-B storage policy delivers maximum storage space without a single large capacity and costly hard drive.

Sounds like SPAN to me.

The CLONE MODE storage policy stores all data in duplicate on separate drives to protect against data loss due to drive failure. One drive clones the others at all times. Every write operation goes to all drives. CLONE MODE provides the highest level of data protection for critical data that you cannot afford to lose if a hard drive fails, but waste the amount of storage capacity because all data must be stored to all drives. The resulting storage capacity of the virtual CLONE volume will be equivalent to the size of one hard drive (if all drives are the same) or the smallest of the all drives (if they are different). If drive fails (Maximum four drives), the CLONE volume is still usable, but it is in a vulnerable state because its cloned hard drive is inaccessible.

Super paranoid mode!

I'd post the manual but it is 11MB, has pictures of all the above. It has a motherboard compatibility list with southbridges listed and that goes all the way down to intel ICH5, both R and non RAID versions listed.

 

[Bozo]

Thanks! I will look into one of these for work.

 

[MaxBurn]

So far:
The setup was really easy, set the dip switches and it is ready to go. I think for RAID 3 or 5 it might have some initlization time.

Does not appear to be a staggered startup in use, hopefully not a problem.

The LED indicators next to the drives are super dim, because the LED is on the back plane and has to travel through a piece of plastic to get to the front. Those LED's indicate access and errors, but there is a second set of LED's on the bottom that you can see with the door closed which are normal bright.

Fan noise from the small power supply fan is SUPER annoying, don't plan on putting this near a desk.

I chose GPT and default cluster size.
5x Seagate ST32000542AS 5900RPM drive
A bare drive I can see transfer rates around 90MB/s

I chose GPT and default cluster size. 5 disk RAID 0.

So far on my desktop attached to the eSATA port on a GA-x58A-UD5 I only see a max write to the array of 150MB/s. It started out at 250MB/s but fell off fast. This being fed from the intel 80gb G2 SSD. I am not sure I like the eSATA controller on this board, works OK but performance doesn't seem great.

As SATA it appears to perfectly compatible with Hotswap v5.

I'm going to move it to the server and see how it does there.

 

[MaxBurn]

Things were looking good. Yesterday I was able to transfer almost all the contents of my array over to this thing. Using fastcopy I saw write speeds around 160~220MB/s. All was well at the end of the day, I could read the stuff I put on the drive no problem. I was thinking I was all set and it just worked.

Now today I don't see the drive letter and storage manager wants to initlize it as a 1122gb disk. The intel raid manager still sees it (because it is on the ICH9R) and identifies it as the same name it used to and with capacity 9538gb. I rebooted and power cycled the enclosure once or twice and still the same.

 

[MaxBurn]

I moved it to my win7 box and it sees the same thing with a little more info 9+tb RAW healthy primary partition. It sees the size as 9314gb.

 

[CougTek]

Doesn't look good. I think we'll soon see new photos on Mr. Fingerman's Flickr account.

 

[LunarMist]

Are the hard drives qualifed for RIAD use?

 

[Mercutio]

I had horrible problems using 2TB Seagate green drives in Windows SoftRAIDs. I suspect there's something in the drive firmware that makes them a bad choice for RAID scenarios, like extra-long thermal calibrations or something.

 

[MaxBurn]

Well thats not good to hear. When I get back I will load the tools from the disk and see what they say. But I'm thinking a good 90+% of these types of enclosures are never going to see raid qualified drives.

 

[CougTek]

I think Hibachi's are the safe choice for RAID anything. Even though they are not explicitly certified for it, they seem to be those working best in such configurations. Otherwise, if you absolutely want RAID-certified drives, be ready to throw out a big chunk of green bills. Seagate's Constellation drives and Western Digital's RE drives are close to twice the price of their vanilla conterparts.

 

[MaxBurn]

My problem seems to be with the SATA connection on my server. I used the box with the desktop machine via a real eSATA port on the motherboard and reformatted it and it was fine. Threw a bunch of files at it, copied them, disconnected reconnected etc and it was fine. Took it to the server via SATA and it saw a 1.12TB raw disk. The server is using the internal SATA port to back panel adapter cable, plus the eSATA-eSATA cables that were included with the sansdigital device.

Connected the box to the server via USB 2 and it saw the whole drive just fine. Now on day two of what appears to be a four day file copy and it is just trundling along without issue. 27.58 MB/s.

I think I'm looking at a combination of the SATA cable being rather long with one extra connection than normal as a cabling issue or there is something in the ICH9R that doesn't like the sansdigital box.

 

[Bozo]

Is AHCI enabled in the BIOS and have you loaded the latest Intel drivers?

 

[LunarMist]

The product is deactivated at the EGG. Does that mean it is discontinued?

I'm wondering if the CLEANER mode works for 3-4TB drives.

 

[MaxBurn]

Well it says it supports 3TB drives on their site somewhere. I got it from amazon.

It should be done with the backup mid morning to investigate the SATA issue. I'm thinking cabling over drivers but will check both.

 

[LunarMist]

The 3TB Hitachi is mentioned. It looks like EggFace has the silver colored version available, but I'm not confident of their packing/shippping.