There are various features that are valued as part of the Home Server. For some users it is media streaming capabilities, others like the easy remote access to allow friends and family to access our shared content on the server, and many others are most interested in the ability to back up the PCs and Macs in their home. All of these uses have a single dependency, and that is storage — the ability to store as much data as we want, and to protect the most important data by redundantly storing it on multiple hard drives.

The MediaSmart Servers all come with four internal hard drive bays for expansion, but what happens when you’ve filled those bays and need even more room to grow? The Sans Digital TowerRaid TR5M Storage Enclosure offers the ability to greatly expand the available storage of your MediaSmart Server EX470 and EX475.

Overview

Sans Digital is a provider of high capacity, multi-functional advanced storage solutions and is headquartered in City of Industry, California. They offer a variety of products on their website, from massive 8-drive USB and eSATA storage towers, to portable hard drive enclosures with built-in memory card readers, to Fibre Channel rack mount solutions.

Sans Digital has shown a strong interest in making their products known to the community by providing support and information in a positive, outgoing way. Representatives from Sans Digital have an active presence on our forums, been actively trying to research the cause of the EX470 only seeing 4 of the 5 drives in the TR5M, and have been gracious enough to provide me the opportunity to spend some time using one of their storage enclosures.

The TR5M supports five SATA hard drives that fit into included slot-loading trays, with LEDs for status and activity. The EX470 and EX475 are known to only support four drives in eSATA enclosures, presumably due to the Marvell 88SE6111 chip used, so the 5th drive would not be usable by these servers. As I mentioned in my recent review, the new EX485 and EX487 don’t support port multipliers at all, and so would only see a single drive in the enclosure. This would likely discourage most users from wanting to use the TR5M with their EX487, though I do offer another usage scenario towards the end of this review.

Here are the enclosure specifications from the manufacturers website.

• Model: TR5M-B
• Form Factor: Compact Tower
• HDD Trays: 5 Hot-Swappable 3.5″
• RAID Level: RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 5, 5+spare, spanning and JBOD (using bundled utilities)
• Maximum Capacity: 7.5TB
• Host Interface & Transfer Rate: eSATA 3Gbps (via Port Multiplier)
• Drive Interface: 5 x 3.5” SATA I / SATA II
• Cooling Fan: 4.7″ Ball Bearing Fan
• Power Supply: 220W (103V-253V)
• Control Interface: N/A
• Status Indicators: Status and Power LEDs
• Dimension (in): 6.0″W x 8.25″H x 11.0″D
• Weight (lb): 9.3
• Safety Regulations: CE, FCC, UL, RoHS
• Limited Watrranty: 1 Years
• Package Contents: TR5M-B (1)
  Power Cord (1)
  eSATA Cable (1)
  2-Port eSATA PCIe Adapter Card (1)
  Screws (1 set)
  Quick Installation Manual & CD (1)

Hardware and packaging

The TR5M arrives in packaging showing the enclosure and is securely packed in shaped foam inserts. A small cardboard box contains all the necessary accessories you’ll need to be up and running with either your MediaSmart Server, DIY Home Server, or PC. These include the power cord, eSATA cable (approximately 1 meter in length), PCIe eSATA adapter card, CD with software and manuals, and a Quick Installation Guide. Also included is a card with contact information for the Sans Digital support organization, I always appreciate when a company makes it easy to contact them when you need assistance.

The enclosure itself is a very attractive gloss black (a silver model is also available) with a mesh metal screen door covering the drive trays. Looking at the rear of the enclosure, we see the power and eSATA connections, as well as vents for the power supply and a single 120mm case fan. There are three thumbscrews that attach the outer case to the chassis which can provide quick access to the inside of the enclosure, however you don’t need to remove the case for normal operation of the server.

I should note that during my disassembly of the TR5M, I noticed several markings bearing the CFI logo, which is another vendor of storage enclosures. Stanley from Sans Digital has confirmed that they and CFI are partners.

The drive status and activity LEDs are behind this door, which reduces their visibility to some degree. I prefer this, as rapidly blinking lights quickly become tiring to me. The drive trays are easy to use, only requiring a simple slide of the lock mechanism to release the latch arm, and then the tray can be removed from the enclosure. The drive trays do require screws (included with the enclosure) to mount the hard drives. This is an area I would love to see Sans Digital improve and move to a screwless drive tray that’s as simple to use as the ones in the MediaSmart Server.

Server usage

I’ve already mentioned that none of the MediaSmart Servers are able to utilize all five drives of the TR5M, so I’m sure some of you are wondering why I chose this model to review. In all honesty, I had hoped to be able to find some combination of BIOS tweaks and driver version that would allow all five drives to be detected by the EX475, however to date I have been unsuccessful. Since there is only about a $20 price differential between the TR4M 4-drive model and the TR5M 5-drive model it seems a worthwhile upgrade given the variety of uses for the enclosure.

When connecting the TR5M to the EX475, there is no need to install the RAID configuration utility as WHS will see the bottom four drives in the enclosure as individual drives for you to install either to the Server Storage pool or as backup drives. Adding a drive to the top (fifth) slot does nothing useful as the drive is never recognized by the EX475.

It should be noted that the Windows Home Server Storage Tab is not able to identify which slot of the enclosure each drive is in, so you may want to insert each drive individually, see it recognized in the Server Console, and then label the drive with a marker or label writer. This way you can identify the drive to remove should it fail or you decide to replace it.

When connecting the TR5M to the EX487, the bottom drive in the enclosure is recognized and made available for use as part of the storage pool or a backup drive. Windows Home Server correctly labels the location of the drive as “External(SATA)”, making it easy to identify in the event you need to remove or replace it. While connected to the server via Remote Desktop, I inserted a drive into the TR5M and noticed the Intel Storage Manager utility launch a popup from the system tray alerting me to the presence of a new storage device and stating that if it was a port multiplier, only port 0 will be active.

Usability of the TR5M with the EX487 was excellent, with the system very quickly recognizing the drive in the enclosure upon power on and also when performing hot swap insert and removal. I didn’t have quite as smooth an experience with the EX475, as sometimes the server required a reboot to see the drives in the enclosure, and hot swap did not always work as expected. This behavior was also highly dependent upon the Marvell driver version I used, including some very difficult to troubleshoot reboot cycles I encountered with the latest driver version available via Windows Update. Given the good experience I had with the TR5M attached to the EX487 and my PC, I attribute any strange behavior to the Marvell chipset in the EX475. With regards to hard drives, I experienced no issues with the enclosure recognizing any of the six drives I tested it with.

Not just for use with a server

Sans Digital expects that not everyone will be using the TR5M with servers or PCs that already have an eSATA port, so they have included a PCIe x1 eSATA adapter card that features the popular Silicon Images Sil 3132 chip with two eSATA ports. The TR5M Quick Installation Guide instructs the user to install the card, and then install the driver from the included CD, however my Vista system easily detected the new card and installed a driver that worked fine without any additional drivers needed. If you want to use the RAID features of the enclosure, you’ll need to install the SATARAID utility from the included CD. Below is a picture of the card, and Device Manager showing the Storage Controller and five installed hard drives.

Since the TR5M includes a PCIe card for eSATA connectivity it can also be used with your PC in a number of ways beyond storage expansion for your MediaSmart Server. One of the most appealing to me is in the event of a significant hardware failure of your Server, you could attach the TR5M to your PC, insert the hard drives from your MediaSmart Server, and access all your stored data. In this way you could recover your data to your PC, or transfer it to a replacement server.

I tried this scenario, taking the drives out of my server and viewing them as individual drives in the TR5M and this worked great. In the following screenshots, volumes K through P are 5 drives (6 volumes) from my personal and development Home Servers that I have inserted into the TR5M, and then using Explorer to navigate the drives to recover a file.

While I had the TR5M connected to my PC, I took the opportunity to run some performance tests using IOZone. Performance of both reading and writing to a 1TB Seagate drive in the enclosure was only a little behind the performance of the same drive connected internally to my PC via SATA.

Sound and energy

I do not have a decibel meter so cannot definitively state the sound levels from the TR5M, however I was comfortable with the amount of noise coming from the enclosure. I could easily hear the sound of the EX487 disk drives working over the fan noise from the TR5M.

I plugged the TR5M into my Kill-A-Watt P3 to measure the power consumption of the enclosure. I used a variety of drives ranging in capacity from 200GB up to 1TB. Here are my findings:

• 0 drives: 20 watts
• 1 drive: 29 watts
• 2 drives: 38 watts
• 3 drives: 46 watts
• 4 drives: 54 watts
• 5 drives: 63 watts

Summary

Pros

• Attractive, glossy finish
• Relatively quiet
• Excellent performance
• Included eSATA adapter card allows use with any PC

Cons

• Screws required to mount drives to the trays
• MediaSmart Server EX470 and EX475 only recognize 4 of the 5 drives (server limitation)
• MediaSmart Server EX485 and EX487 only recognize 1 of the 5 drives (server limitation)

Over the course of the past few weeks that I’ve had the Sans Digital TR5M-B in my lab, I’ve grown quite attached to it. The storage expansion capabilities for the MediaSmart Server EX470 and EX475 are fantastic, even though limitations of the EX470 and EX475 allow only four of the five drives to be utilized the EX485 and EX487 allow only a single drive to be utilized. When you also consider the ability to connect the Storage Enclosure to your PC, hot swap ability for adding and removing drives, and high performance of the eSATA connection, I’d be hard pressed to come up with a more useful tool for your home storage needs.

The TR5M and and other Sans Digital products are available directly from the Sans Digital store as well as other retailers such as Newegg.com.

Tagged as: eSATA, Hardware, Reviews